When the World Was Far Away

A distant memory is one of gray-scale imagery, broadcast history, vintage 1950s. Folks in the United States watched simultaneous televised screenshots of the East and West Coasts of their own country — how miraculous, observing vague, low-resolution images of both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans at the same time!

The journalist giddily hosting that broadcast behaved as though it were comparable to a moon landing, something that would not occur for well over a decade, in the summer of 1969 — and what a year that was, when the Beatles performed publicly for the last time on a rooftop in the faraway city of London, and for the first time, a spacecraft from planet Earth landed two men safely on Earth’s moon — the sunset of one era and the dawn of another. One could be seen in a local movie theater, the other on a television in someone’s living room.

If you didn’t happen to witness an event when it occurred, like so many of us did with that first moon landing, you might not learn of it until a day or so later, once the news percolated down into a mellow come-and-go of rural towns such as the one where I grew up.

In those days, the local newspaper landed in most front yards, tossed by a neighborhood kid who earned a few bucks each month making sure folks found their current events laying on a porch near the morning milk delivery, or waiting in the driveway at the end of a busy day, or perhaps lodged in a hedge.

Some stories were more fully explored in words and pictures by magazines delivered with the mail, purchased at newsstands and bought off the rack at grocery stores. Appearing on a weekly or monthly basis, they were a staple in many households. Time, Newsweek, Life and Look were mainstays.

The most direct window upon the world, however, was a television set that occupied the focal point in our family room. Every so often, our dad would show up with a new one, each update bigger and supposedly better than the last. Most notably was a wood-paneled Zenith model that came with remote control — nothing short of astounding, for no longer did we have to get up and walk across the room to turn on the TV or change the channel; we needed only to point a metal box about the size of a Klondike bar, press a button, and … click, shazam! … it just happened. Small-town life afforded few experiences more incredible than that.

In the 1960s, my dad rarely missed the reporting of Walter Cronkite and colleagues on CBS, televised journalism’s gold standard in those days. If something happened out there in that world that was far away, it just didn’t seem real to us small-towners until it was reported by a member of Cronkite’s crack team of intrepid reporters.

I often would sit with my dad in the early evening to see what those network folks had to say, doing my best to follow along. However, with Sunday morning shows like “Meet the Press,” I didn’t stand a chance: Not at all like my pal Captain Kangaroo, who came on weekday mornings smiling, gesturing amicably and expressing himself in an easily-understood manner, those Sunday morning guys were deadpan, off-putting, no more expressive than the faces you’d see on “Clutch Cargo,” and with run-on phrasings that frustratingly made no more sense to me than gobbledygook.

Network newscasts, newspapers and magazines all served their purposes, opening windows to the world that were as specific as they were limiting. And people’s concerns were limited accordingly in a world held at some distance, at bay if you will, by design as much as necessity.

It seemed a comfort to folks knowing what they needed to live in peace could be found within a narrow radius, that what happened in the faraway places didn’t seem to matter as much as regularly attending a church with a pleasant pastor; buying fresh produce or hardware from someone they’d known for decades; sending their children to orderly schools focused on the fundamentals; driving their American-made cars on clean, safe roads; and making monthly payments to a reliable doctor, milkman and paperboy.

The rest of the world was out there … somewhere … and it felt fine just to keep it there.

Coming up … Another Distant Memory

David Tlapek is a Missouri native, born and raised in Cape Girardeau. A formerly practicing attorney, he is now a writer and filmmaker living in California.