As far as memories go, I was around for the very first WrestleMania. I was a young kid upstairs at my uncle's restaurant in a change room or staff room watching it, I think, illegally, on a black and white television.
I started to work in television for three or four years, in 1954. There was one channel of television, black and white. But it could be entertaining and educational. During the evening they showed important plays, opera or Shakespeare's tragedies.
When I was a kid, we didn't have a TV until the late '50s, but I can remember watching Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers, Steve McQueen, and 'Gunsmoke.'
I grew up watching 'The Lone Ranger.' I would get up every Saturday morning, earlier than all the other kids, to watch a black and white western with Clayton Moore that hadn't filmed a new episode since 1957.
There was never a moment in George Carlin's career where he dipped below an A+. When he came out with the "Hippie Dippie Weatherman" on The Tonight Show, I mean, it seems so mundane now, but it was in black and white TV and the whole bit was that this guy smoked tons of grass and was a terrible weather man. "Forecast for tonight? Dark."
I was brought up in a tenement house in a working district. We didn't even have a bathroom! We had a gaslight in the hallway and a black-and-white TV.
There were some television sets back in the '50s, but they were expensive. People would gather at the rich guy's apartment down the hall to watch Milton Berle on his 10-inch black-and-white screen.
I used to watch the 'Jackie Gleason Show' and Phil Silvers, those early TV things. And a lot of them were patterned on the silent comedies of the '20s.
I grew up in a small village outside of Krakow, and when I was small we had only a small television, and we had only one and two programs. I remember it was black and white. And I loved to watch Charlie Chaplin. I was so small, but I remember his movement.
Until Color TV came along, BW TV was too muddy to be enjoyable.
One of my earliest memories was President [J.F.] Kennedy's funeral. I actually remember sitting on the floor in the living room looking at our black-and-white television and watching the caisson roll by and hearing the clip-clop of the horses. It's actually one of my earliest memories.
