Growing up in the outskirts of Louisville, Kentucky, my absolute favorite reading materials were the Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge comic books. Once a week I’d accompany my mother to the A & P Supermarket, and she’d give me a nickel for a comic.

[My friend Gunnar with his beehive.]

I loved the irreverence of the ducks and the energetic, abbreviated way in which their tales hopped from one frame to the next. I learned a lot from those comic books. When grown-ups would ask me how it was that I knew the meaning of some fancy word I might use, I enjoyed telling them I’d learned it from Donald Duck comics.

[Hiking at Castle Rock Park]

By now some of my school friends had televisions. One boy lived within walking distance, and I went to his house to see the Howdy Doody show. It was the first time I’d ever seen a television.

I liked the show a lot, I could hardly believe how great television was—the creamy black and white shades, the hiss of static, the announcer’s rounded tones, the jerky scan across the children in the audience, the hilarious commercials for Ipana toothpaste.

[Inside the Capitol buildng in Madison, Wisconsin.]

There were some great ads for Jell-O as well. In the Jell-O ad, a warm housewife voice would sing-song “busy day, busy day,” as her cartoon icon hurried around. And then would come the Jell-O. And I remmber an ad—for what?—with the tag line, “Chinese baby say…[Product name]!” I loved that the baby. I’d never seen a Chinese person.

I didn’t actually like the puppet Howdy Doody himself—he disgusted me. And I hated his conniving partner Clarabelle the clown. But near the end of the show, they’d air a cartoon, and the cartoons were paradise.

My brother and I worked on our parents, and eventually they agreed to get a television. We went to a department store in downtown Louisville, and Pop negotiated with the salesman for nearly an hour. Embry and I watched a cowboy show on the dozens of display TVs, the horsemen eternally riding down a sandy road beneath dry, spindly trees.

We went home with a Dumont set, a small tube in a cubical yellowish cabinet that might have been particle-board. You could get two channels in Louisville, 3 and 11. And at 4 p.m. on Saturday afternoons I’d get to watch Cartoon Circus.

I worshipped that show. To make it even better, when I watched Cartoon Circus, Mom would give me my one soft-drink of the week, orange soda in a pale green anodized aluminum cup.

Everything about the cartoons was wonderful. The exultant blare of chase music, the high slangy voices, the xylophone sound of sneaking footsteps, the moany-groany graveyards with twisting ghosts, the sarcastic ducks, the battles and stratagems of the cats and the mice.

[My friend Emilio.]

One Saturday afternoon my father for some reason wanted to take me for a drive in the car.

“No, no! I have to watch Cartoon Circus.”

“Oh, don’t worry, we can hear it on the car radio.”

I wasn’t quite sure if watching cartoons on the radio would work—and then, of course, it turned out that there wasn’t any cartoon radio show at all. But I didn’t nag my father on it. He seemed a little sad and distracted. Perhaps he and Mom were having a fight.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 20th, 2008 at 12:15 pm and is filed under Rudy's Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.