The Wild Rainiers

Why was Washington one of the first two states to legalize marijuana?  Those like me who came of age with Rainier Beer and Ivar's Acres of Clams commercials understand.

The End of Broadcast Television

There's a terrific analysis of the societal changes since World War II that are dooming broadcast television in the October 25 online Newsweek.  Check it out at http://a.msn.com/r/2/BBb9Lb4?a=1&m=en-us.

Weather as a Graphic Novel

“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows …”

                        Bob Dylan, Subterranean Homesick Blues

            There’s a storm blowing in from the southwest, drawing moisture all the way from the remnants of a hurricane near Hawaii.  It will arrive in my neighborhood in about three hours.  Winds will be blustery, and I can expect at least a half inch of rain this evening.

            I know all of this because I have access, whether on broadcast TV or my computer, to the most sophisticated, high-tech meteorological equipment on the face of the earth.  I have multiple radar stations lighting up my screen with shades of green, yellow, orange and, occasionally and worryingly, red; I have satellite images of cloud patterns far out into the Pacific; I have live weather cameras scattered around the state; I have graphs and charts from Federal agencies and the University of Washington; I have an app from the Weather Channel that tells me, minute by minute, what’s happening and what will ensue in the immediate future.  I have video and GoPro pseudo-experiences of tornadoes, hurricanes and blizzards.  Weather is a certifiable obsession, not just for me, but for many of us who live in the Northwest.  I used to do content analyses of local television news broadcasts for my Mass Media class.  In every broadcast, around 11% of the time was devoted to weather (25% was commercials, another 11% was sports—that doesn’t leave much time for actual “news”).

            It’s colorful, scientific, entertaining—such weathercasters as Jeff Renner and Steve Pool are local icons—but it’s not fun.

            It used to be.  I grew up with weather presented as a graphic novel.

            Early television news was, quite frankly, pretty boring.  A reconstructed radio or newspaper reporter read copy from a paper script, often with a backdrop of analog clocks set to different time zones.  “Video” was really film clips (usually days out of date) from movie newsreels. The tone was straight-laced and somber, and the coverage (local broadcasts lasted fifteen minutes) superficial.  But television, as early producers were discovering, is fundamentally more than “radio with pictures”—it’s a visual medium.  You have to see things, not hear about them.

            But just how, in a pre-satellite, pre-weather radar, pre-remote video world, was one to show a low-pressure area?

            For KING TV in Seattle, the answer was cartoons.  In 1951, when they were still the only station in the Northwest, they hired a local commercial cartoonist, Bob Hale, and commissioned him to illustrate the weather.  Although his was hardly an effervescent personality, Bob Hale quickly became a star.  He had little scientific or meteorological expertise, but that wasn’t necessary; the U.S. Weather Bureau supplied the forecasts.  Hale’s task was to make them comprehensible to the rest of us, and he did so admirably, with a happy sun (“Old Saul”), grim, glowering clouds and puffy wind gusts.  It was like a high-school magic show every night—a bespectacled, balding, geeky guy (reportedly not infrequently fortified by liquids from the nearby Doghouse bar) with an easel and grease pens.  His segment often drew more viewers than the news itself, and his cheery, simple style inspired some of us to try our hands at cartooning. 

Bob Hale

           

  I was one of them.  At the height of his popularity, Bob Hale offered a correspondence course in cartooning, and I prevailed upon my parents to pay for my tuition.  Each week I’d receive a lesson and send my “homework” back to be evaluated.  Unfortunately, my evaluations revealed that I had little talent and nothing in particular to say in graphic art, and a future career in cartooning weathercasting was dashed. 

            Hale’s wasn’t.  He attained national notice and, in the early ‘60s, was lured away to San Diego, to be replaced by another cartoonist, Bob Cram.   Cram was actually funnier and had a more complex style, and he created a cast of recurring characters like Onshore Flo and Milli Bar to dramatize upcoming events.  For nearly another decade he carried on the cartooning tradition on KING, even after Hale came back for a brief comeback attempt.

            But it was a new age, a Space Age, and new technologies left little room for folksy guys with grease pens.  Sexy weathergirls in front of green screens, yes.  But cartooning weathermen…not so much.  By the early ‘70s, even KING became serious and scientific, and the weathermap became increasingly colorful and graphic in a far different way. Weathercasters increasingly possessed advanced degrees and scientific credentials and actually prepared their own forecasts from an increasing array of tools and data.  And weather became a serious, sober subject.

            Is it just coincidence that in this new age we have a flourishing culture of Know-Nothing climate change deniers?  Maybe they’d benefit from a cartoonist to explain it all to them.

           

J.P. Patches--Icon of Seattle Children's Television

The Umbilical

            Know what this is?



            If you’re of the television generation, you’ll recognize it immediately:  a Television Signal Enhancement Device (TSED).
 

            The other day, my wife and I contemplated a $4000, 4K, Ultra High-Definition, curved-screen TV.  The image was incredible:  nearly 3D without dork glasses, sharp and precise like the finest studio still photography, color of purest hue … 
 

            Impressive.  Mesmerizing, in fact.  It’s not anything like what we grew up with.
 

            It’s not just that, for nearly a decade and a half, television was black and white.  It’s that, most often, the image was nearly indecipherable and required constant attention and adjustment.  Even in the cities, not far from the transmitters, the picture could be wavy, filled with electronic “snow” or horizontal bars.  It could start “flipping” vertically, out of control.  And the signal was subject to weather conditions or time of day.  Sometimes, we could quite clearly watch programs from KTNT in Tacoma or even KVOS in Bellingham, 85 miles away.  Other times, we couldn’t even pick up KIRO in Seattle itself.  Hence the coathanger, often supplemented with flags of aluminum foil.  It was all part of the delightful and frustrating mystery of television.
 

            Ironically, the solution was already at hand, coincident with the very birth of television in the Pacific Northwest.
 

            Astoria, Oregon, at the mouth of the Columbia River, is the oldest white settlement in the Northwest, dating back to the Fur Trade; it’s an unlikely place for technology revolutions.  But the wife of an engineer (and owner of a small radio station) named Ed Parsons had seen a demonstration of television in 1947 in Chicago, and she wanted her own set.  She must have been very persuasive, because not only was there no broadcaster in the region but, even if there had been, Astoria is behind a wall of mountains that blocked broadcast signals from either Seattle or Portland.  With a population at the time of around 10,000, it was far too small for its own TV station, either. 
 

            In time for the first broadcast from Seattle on Thanksgiving, 1948, Parsons put an antenna on the roof of the Astoria Hotel and strung a coaxial cable from it into his apartment.  The result:  happy wife—and the birth of cable television.  You can read his own account here.
 

            In a way, this genesis was unfortunate, because it created a perceptual block to the potential of cable.  This type of service went by the acronym CATV:  Community Antenna Television.  It was seen as a means to improve what already existed—a (much) better coathanger, if you will.  CATV could bring in distant stations, all right, but only if they were technically within the broadcast range.  The FCC, under pressure from broadcasters and their supporting advertisers, decreed that all local stations HAD to be carried and no distant stations could be offered if they duplicated local programming.  For three decades, this service lay dormant.  Most of us didn’t need it:  coathangers were far cheaper, and we were used to squiqqly, snowy images.
 

            But in the mid-seventies, things started changing.  First came Home Box Office (HBO), offering (for an additional price) recent-run, uncut movies.  Then the cable systems started offering WTBS from Atlanta.  Atlanta, Georgia!  Cool!  There was something especially exotic about watching old movies and second-run programs from the opposite coast.  There was even something exotic about watching Canadian news from Vancouver B.C.  And MTV.  Little melodramatic musicals!  Video Killed the Radio Star.  And ESPN.  My wife and I became, for a time, big fans of Australian Rules Football (although I suspect she was mostly drawn to the tight shorts the players wear.)  

 



            And from there it was but a short sprint to The Sopranos and Mad Men and home renovation programs and 24-hour golf and clear, sharp pictures—and 4K, $4000 screens.
 

            And now it’s all changing again.  Just in the past few days, HBO and CBS both announced that they will make their programming available through internet streaming without a cable or satellite subscription.  More and more people, rebelling against mandatory “bundling” of programming and outrageous cable subscription fees, have been “cord-cutting” and relying upon such services as Netflix to enjoy television. 
 

            Cable, if you’ll pardon me, may already be reaching the end of the line.