When I was a kid, I had ambitions for being a television announcer, which was before television took off, you know, in the late '40s.
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 rode into the dawning world of television in 1944 on a train.
Growing up, I missed the whole 'Three Stooges' thing. Either they weren't on the station in my hometown, or we hadn't bought a TV set yet, or they came to town too late for me. I'm pretty sure that at the right age, I would have loved them.
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.
Most of my career up until the last couple of years has basically been a training ground for me. Actors that came up in the '50s and '60s, they had the theater, and television was in its infancy.
Lights became so hot they melted mascara on women's faces in early television.
I remember growing up with television, from the time it was just a test pattern, with maybe a little bit of programming once in a while.
I've seen the invention of television and performed on television even before my family owned one.
When you built television sets, you have all this test equipment. And you'd have all these lines and squares on the screen to test it. So it occurred to me that it might be fun for people to control the lines and squares on the screen.
I do think that television, in its early years, played a significant role in that standard-setting, enforcing a certain decency among people. They took their role seriously, and the people behind the camera took their role seriously, too.
I was the first voice of Baltimore television in 1947.
It was a period when live TV was just starting and getting popular and they took it seriously too. Not so much like TV now. They did Hemingway and Faulkner - and they’re all wonderful artists and it just was very creative at that time.
