It was a Hindenburg
moment. Two men had just died in a tower
of water and flying debris, on live television.
The announcer, Bill O’Mara, had no script and no precedent. It was 1951, and viewers six years away from
the war were plenty familiar with death—but it was something distant and hidden
whenever possible. When it covered the
D-Day invasion, Life magazine had agreed
to a War Department request not to show any bodies, and that was the general
rule. But here, in the middle of a civic
festival and sporting event, it was: unavoidable,
graphic, and immediate.
Bill O’Mara led his invisible audience in the Lord’s Prayer.
That’s my first memory of television.
I was nine months old when the first television broadcast was
made in Seattle. A struggling station
owned by an appliance store, KRSC,
broadcast a high-school football game from Memorial Stadium (well, most of it,
anyway; the equipment shorted out from rain) live and in grainy
black-and-white, accessible to only a small handful of privately-owned
sets. Shortly afterward, it was bought
by the heir of a lumber fortune, Dorothy Bullitt, and eventually transformed
into the regional powerhouse KING Broadcasting.
In the summer of 1951, when I was three, Seattle hosted its
first and, for quite some time, only major-league sporting event, the Gold Cup
unlimited boat race. A local car dealer,
Stanley Sayres, had commissioned a revolutionary boat from local builder Ted
Jones, the Slo-Mo-Shun IV, and with it
had won a stunning victory in Detroit in the 1950 Gold Cup, giving him the
right to host the race in Seattle. Already, after only three years, nearly
39,000 televisions were owned, most of them in Seattle. KING TV was the only station licensed in the
area at the time, and the event provided the perfect opportunity to demonstrate
the capabilities of the new medium. With
bulky telephoto-equipped cameras set up on towers, the station could cover, at
least from a distance, the entire two-mile course on Lake Washington.
Unlimited boat racing was dominated by wealthy dilettantes
from the East, primarily Detroit, and no event had ever been held west of the
Mississippi, so this Gold Cup brought a form of national recognition to an
attention-starved upstart city. And, of
course, it brought a contingent of chastened boat owners determined to win back
their accustomed trophy. Sayres was
prepared with a new, second boat, the Slo-Mo-Shun
V, to meet the challenge of Detroit’s powerhouses and the Lake
Tahoe-based Hurricane IV. And an entrant from Portland, Orth
Mathiot, built a new boat named Quicksilver,
which was finished late and largely untested.
And, in the final heat, he and his riding mechanic, Thomas
Whittaker, died. The boat nosed into the
water and disintegrated, live
on television.
And that was the first of many deaths I witnessed as a I grew
up with television: the on-air murder of
Lee Harvey Oswald, the deaths of Apollo 1 astronauts Roger Chaffee, Ed White
and Gus Grissom (and the later explosion of the space shuttle Challenger), the
deaths of racing legends Ayrton Senna and Dale Earnhardt, and so many
others. I witnessed war, murder,
suicide, and accident. A Japanese
performance art group in Seattle dangled from a skyscraper upside down and a
rope broke, sending one of them headfirst to the sidewalk. I watched thousands die in the World Trade
Center, and a Viet Cong prisoner shot in the head by his captor. I’ve seen children die of starvation and
disease, and soldiers die in battle, and, from helicopter vantage points, live
shoot-outs between criminals and police.
It’s fashionable these days to disparage “reality
television.” And it’s been a critic’s
commonplace since its inception to identify television as a source of
distorted, unreal images of American life.
All that’s legitimate. But it’s
also worth remembering that no medium in history has so consistently confronted
consumers with the most basic of realities—the one most of us go to great
lengths to avoid facing. If nothing
else, television has been the machine of mortality.
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