Dream Girl

Annette.

Psychologists posit something called the “cognitive schema.”  It’s a mental framework, a scaffolding, that we use for organizing our experiences and observations.  The framework, of course, forms in infancy, and new input is added to it throughout our lives.  If it doesn’t fit into the schema, we tend to discard it.

Annette.

We construct cognitive schema about people, events, roles, and even ourselves—they enable us to evaluate what’s happened and to predict what comes next.  They help us apply our values and to judge others’, and they make sense of the vast, chaotic mess of daily life.

Annette.

Behavioral scripts are learned through organizational socialization and on the job experience  According to Charles T. Schmidt of the University of Rhode Island, one of the ways we build this schema is to learns from “stories, myths, films, movies, conversations, role models.”  They even play a part in romance:  we tend to fall in love with the people who most closely match our cognitive schema for the “perfect” mate.

I built a huge chunk of mine from television.  And, as my schema of the ideal woman began to take shape, she looked and acted increasingly like one TV personality.

Annette. Annette Funicello.

I was seven.  She was twelve when the Mickey Mouse Club debuted in 1955.  Of course, millions of male baby boomers were around the same age, too, and subsequent experience tells me that many, if not most, of use developed a huge first crush on Annette.  She was the tallest of the Mouseketers  and arguably the most talented—a singer, a dancer, an outgoing extrovert.  Dark black hair, round face, ebullient personality and full of charm, she was the embodiment of the nascent bobby soxer of the ‘50s, and she even wore a rather tight turtleneck sweater as she grew and, um, developed.

And then, in the ‘60s, as I hit puberty, she hit the beach.  At first, Walt Disney insisted that she wear a demure, one-piece bathing suit for her “Beach Party” movies with Frankie Avalon, but she eventually donned a two-piece—still demure and modest, but a harbinger of the rebellions of the 1960s.  She exuded joy, good cheer, and the kind of innocent purity that the 1950s demanded of female role models.  And she held onto the complete image even after so many of use rejected it.

Then came the stunning part:  this avatar of energy and good, clean health had Multiple Sclerosis, the same disease my own mother had battled for over two decades and which finally killed her.  She faced it with dignity and courage, speaking publicly about her affliction, establishing a foundation to research neurological diseases, and providing a very different role model to both women and men.

Annette.  Like Ricky Nelson and Beaver Cleaver, she grew up on screens—and gave us a powerful framework to guide our own adolescence.

A ten-minute documentary about her life can be seen here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_hCCcCbY34

The Demise of Rapid Rudy

I took some old electronics to an electronics recycling station the other day:  a desktop computer, a dead monitor, and an analog, cathode ray television.  The TV still worked (although it needs a digital converter box to pick up a signal), but the color adjustment was off and it would have needed some work.  It wasn’t worth it.

On the way home, I drove through the neighborhood in which I grew up and discovered something shocking (and inevitable):  Rapid Rudy’s has closed for good.

This rickety shop (it always looked as if it had been built during the Depression) had been a fixture in North Seattle as long as I’d lived there; my dad bought our first TV there, and we took others there for repair through the years.  For over 60 years, it was the kind of small business, like independent barber shops and tiny taverns with kitschy names, which gave identity to neighborhoods. In this case, its neighbors included an Elks Lodge and a strip club. It had a web page (http://rapidrudys.com/index.html) and great customer ratings on Yelp.  What it no longer had, though, was a clientele.

Television was born in an era of sustainability.  The mantra of the Depression and World War generations had been “Use it up, wear it out, make it last, or do without.”  The image was brought to us with the help of vacuum tubes, condensors, resistors, and multi-colored wires, and the devices were maintained by technicians with much the same skills as watchmakers.

Now the mantra is “Costco has a deal on ..”

And, until it falls, a deteriorating sign out on Bothell Way stands as a monument to the old ways.

The Tales of Our Fathers: World War II on the Screen

The strings swell and fall, in pace with black and white ocean waves on the screen.  Then the fanfare, and the brass take up the triumphant theme—ending abruptly on, literally, an ominous note.  Sunday afternoons, and I’m a four-year-old taking part in the cataclysm of World War II.

Victory At Sea: The Theme of the High Seas

For me, war is symphonic. In the same way, perhaps, that, for a later generation, Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” provided the score for Vietnam, my soundtrack is “Victory At Sea.” But Wagner was used ironically in Apocalypse Now to suggest racism and imperialism.  Victory At Sea was a Roman Triumph, a celebration of the defeat of the greatest evil the world had ever known.

At the same time I was being born, Samuel Eliot Morison was writing his epic History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, and one of his research assistants, Henry Saloman, started collecting newsreel footage, much of it from our recent enemies.  Saloman produced 26 episodes, focusing mainly on the naval war, and they aired from 1952 to 1953.

I soaked (pardon the pun) them up, and watched them again later in the 1950s when they re-aired.  

Just a sidenote:  This was the swansong for the newsreel—the moment that television news programs were making theatrical newsreels obsolete.  But Victory At Sea gave them one final moment of glory.

In 1895, Stephen Crane published what is arguably the greatest book about the American Civil War, The Red Badge of Courage.  Like me, he was born after the war ended.  Like me, he grew up with stories about the war, tales told by veterans for decades afterward and books like Ulysses S. Grant’s Memoirs.  And young men like Crane and his contemporary, Theodore Roosevelt, grew up imbued with a hunger for adventure and glory.  So, I confess, did I.

But unlike me, they didn’t have television.  To read the books, they had to first learn to read and then to understand.  By the time Crane wrote his book, thirty years after the end of the war, he still loved adventure (he nearly died running guns to Cuban revolutionaries), but he had perspective on the subject.  The Red Badge of Courage is an ironic examination of the “fog of war” and the fickle nature of bravery and the horrible reality of war—hardly a celebration.

My postwar experience was rather different.  We had our novels of the war, too:  From Here to Eternity, The Naked and the Dead, Catch 22… But they came out later, when I was already an adolescent.  They shared an impulse to tell the truth about war, about the brutality and barbarism of even a “just” war.  Had they been my main source of information, I might have been far more skeptical as I came of age and faced the prospect of going to Vietnam.

But I had television, virtually from the first moments of awareness, and I had an heroic score by Richard Rogers and Robert Russell Bennett.  And it wasn’t just Victory At Sea, but a host of other TV shows in the 1950s and 1960s that turned the war into legend.  One of my favorites was The Silent Service, about the exploits of American submariners in the Pacific.  This series had a special resonance for me; I was named after an uncle who died about the U.S.S. Triton (which was featured in an episode of the show.)  I was fascinated by submarines; I would have enlisted in the Navy to serve on one if I’d been old enough.  There was Twelve O’Clock High; if I couldn’t make it into submarines, maybe I could become a bomber pilot.  Vic Morrow starred in Combat.  War even became comedy:  McHale’s Navy’s merry PT Boat crew gave me fantasies of South Sea islands and fast boats; Sergeant Bilko introduced me to a platoon of lovable scoundrels, and Hogan’s Heroes even made life in a German prisoner of war camp sound sort of fun.

It was all preparing me, and the young men of my generation, for our own war, our chance to live out the experiences of our fathers.  But instead of the epic battle against monstrous evil … we got Vietnam.