Dog Days and Early Television

Dog Days and Early Television

 Early TV Set, 1946

Elkton Drive-in Theater advertisement

Certain times in life are especially memorable. Let me tell you about some of those times by taking you back to the early forties for a view of what life was like then. I won’t keep you long.

 One special evening on our farm near Chesapeake City stands out clearly in my mind. I was ten years old and was out under our huge, gnarled maple tree playing with Wiggsey, our family watchdog. I remember looking north, towards town, at old man Scriver’s line of trees and noticing that the sun’s light was still halfway down the trees. It was such a magical sight: the sun had set yet still asserted its power on the land. As time passed, the shadowy bottom part rose imperceptibly, gradually squeezing the light skyward, greedily dominating until it controlled the area entirely. Sure, you know how it is after the sun goes down yet the light still lingers, reluctant to admit defeat and surrender to its dark enemy.

Well, it was one of those early spring evenings, when the chill replaces the sun’s warm beams and you’re cold all of a sudden. Before running outside that evening I had been watching television for a while with my grandmother. The TV set was one of the first to come on the market. It was a large box, full of tubes the size of large salt shakers. The programs were all in black and white in those early days, and the screen, about 8 or 9 inches square, was always distorted in some way, usually with “snow” blurring your view. Every so often the screen image would start flipping vertically or, just as often, it would shift horizontally, displaying zigzagged bars across the screen. Then, of course, someone would jump up and fiddle with the knobs in an attempt to correct it. Then, every couple of weeks, when adjustments failed entirely, my father would take the back off, pull out most of the vacuum tubes, and take them to a shop in Elkton to be tested. If the tubes were not the problem, he would have to call the TV repairman, who usually took several days to show up.

          At any rate, we had had the set for about a year, and that evening my grandmother was seated on the edge of her rocker, with her body thrust forward from the left side of the set and her face six inches from the screen. She was watching “The Cisco Kid,” one of the first cowboy shows to air. Often she would comment on the action: “Watch out! There he is behind that tree. Be careful. Oh, he’s no account!” She was captured—taken prisoner—by those early shows.

          And that was a strange thing for my young mind to figure out, because a year earlier my grandmother would not even look at the TV set. It was a frightening oddity, a near impossibility to her who had lived so many years without it. At first she would go upstairs to her room whenever it was turned on. Then, one early evening, I saw her seated at the top of the stairs, peering across the room at the TV from under the banister railing, with her head up against the white banister posts. As the months went by I noticed that she would move closer and closer to the set until, finally, after about a year’s time, her eyes would be several inches from it.

          Now, as I started to tell you earlier before TV interrupted, I had run outside on that one special evening at sunset, that one special spring evening that still scurries around the halls of my brain, stops, and stamps its feet for my attention when I’m least expecting it. The sun had dropped below the trees in the west, yet patches of warm light still shone on parts of our hillside farm. Wiggsey and I played in it—moved with its warmth—until it dissolved into the ground, leaving us in the chilled shadow of evening. Looking farther up the hill towards the garden, I watched the last patch of its brilliance disappear.

          Even Wiggsey felt the loss. He was a big, Chesapeake Bay retriever, and when I looked back at him he had flopped himself down onto a bare area that he had scratched out next to his box. He lay, feet and tail folded under him, in a complete circle, a perfect curve to his body, with his muzzle resting on the trunk of his tail to form a blended oval. I was surprised that a dog’s spine could curl that much. He was a brown donut with eyes, a black-button nose, and floppy ears that twitched when I whistled through my teeth.

          As far as television was concerned, by the time I was a teenager it had not improved very much. A better form of entertainment was the great Elkton Drive-In Theater off Route 40. Drive-in theaters sprang up all around the country from the late forties until about the late seventies when they all closed down for various reasons.

But when I was a teenager—before I got my license and after—the drive-in was the place to be for fun. Before we boys—my friends in the area—started dating girls, we would get together with a guy who was old enough to have his licenses and access to a car. Then five or six of us would all pile into the car and head for the Elkton Drive-In. It was located where the first Elkton Wal-Mart used to be and, although altered somewhat, the road that led to it from Route 213, Whitehall Road, is still there, but at that time it was all dusty gravel.

           Well, we would swerve onto that road, sometimes fishtailing as we spun around the curves, and when we got to the edge of the drive-in area, the driver would stop and we would all get out. The outside edge of the drive-in area on the 213 side was a strip of land overgrown with saplings, bushes, and other undergrowth that hid the drive-in parking lot from view. Then the driver would go to the ticket booth, pay for his ticket, and go in and park with the other cars. In the meantime, we boys would sneak around the hidden boundary to the very back of the drive-in. From there, which was directly underneath the enormous white screen, we would enter into a small playground area, mingle with the legal patrons, and eventually find our buddy’s car so we could watch the movie in comfort.

          I know this sounds pretty easy, but there’s something I forgot to tell you. The owners knew, somehow, that some people were sneaking in, so they had a man in a jeep with a spotlight riding around the edge of that overgrown area looking for intruders. Many a time, as I snuck through the briars and honeysuckle, I saw that beam of light flashing. So I had to dive to the ground or jump behind a tree. It was sure scary, but that made it more fun and, of course, it made the free movie that much more enjoyable.

          I think now of the changes: my grandmother is gone, Wiggsey is gone, the drive-in theater is gone, and the unreliable televisions are gone. My girlfriend and I still watch TV, distorted now by drowsiness instead of faulty tubes. And the sun still descends on special evenings, leaving us bereft of light, just as it did so many years ago, when Wiggsey coiled within himself to mourn the loss of its warmth.