TELEVISION WAS NEVER IN THE FAMILY

By NICHOLAS DAWIDOFF

I never saw Sesame Street. I never saw Walter Cronkite. I didn't Get Smart either. Not once did I come home from school and settle down on the couch for a little Gilligan's Island or Magilla Gorilla. There was no All in the Family in my family. M*A*S*H, Mannix, Merv, David Frost talking with Richard Nixon, Howard Cosell talking with Howard Cosell, Sunday-morning cartoons, late-night movies--we had none of it. Or, rather, my mother was having none of it. By her decree, ours was the only house in the neighborhood without a television set.

In most ways, I grew up like other kids in the late '60s and '70s. I had pets, played Little League, owned library and baseball cards, listened to American Pie, and every few months I was treated to a Whopper with fries and a movie like Blazing Saddles or Animal House. But Mom drew the line at What's My Line?

She was a high school English teacher with, as they say, her views. "I didn't want you growing up with something that would interfere with your imagination," my mother told me not long ago. "Or with active play, conversation or reading. I thought it was better for us to find more creative ways to deal with the difficult hours--like at the end of the day, when we were tired from work or school--than by plopping you in front of a television set.

"I also had a sense that very young children don't differentiate between what happens on the screen and what real people are doing in the house. A lot of the behavior on TV was what I considered unacceptable. People cavorting naked in hot tubs, bloody pictures from the Vietnam War--things like that can be very shocking for a little kid, and then ultimately numbing. If I took you to a movie that contained things I disapproved of, they were happening somewhere else, and we could talk them over later. I also felt television encouraged passivity. I wanted you to be active, and I noticed that a lot of fat kids watched a lot of TV."

So I played baseball until dusk, and then I read. I read before dinner, after dinner, even during dinner if my sister and I were feuding. (The pages of certain volumes from my childhood are maroon with catsup stains.) When I was especially tired or restless, I reread, with the result that I can still recite passages of Johnny Tremain and The Willie Mays Story from memory.

That was all fine. Braving the schoolyard each morning was another matter. While everyone else stood around discussing the latest episode of Chopper One or Charlie's Angels, I was Lost in Space.

"Builds character," Mom would advise me when I pouted about being "the reject in school who doesn't have a TV." I didn't complain much. "You knew it wouldn't get you anywhere, and increasingly, it became a mark of pride," she recalls.

That's true. For a time, the ban on television made me mad for it. At friends' houses, I gazed at Hawaii Five-O in rapture. But then I began to take pleasure from the fact that I was reading David Copperfield while everybody else was taking in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. I found satisfaction in listening to the Mets on the radio instead of watching the telecast, and I could paint my toy soldiers at the same time.

When people learn that I am, as one friend puts it, a walking anachronism, they often say, "TV is America. How can you not know TV?" Television is a seminal part of the culture I grew up in, and to be excluded from it meant, inevitably, that I missed out on some things. The nightly footage from Vietnam was the fillip for an enduring national conversation, one that helped end the war. The Watergate hearings gave a lot of Americans the impetus to look their government in the eye with justifiable skepticism. There is also plenty of good dramatic television out there, much of it concerned with negotiating romance. I'm sure I learned a lot by reading Victorian novels. Yet watching the quotidian travails of people who dressed and spoke like me might have prepared me a little better for my late teens than George Eliot did.

In retrospect, I think it's unfortunate that television has replaced both reading and the radio for so many people. I'm inclined to agree with my mother that reading about Tom Sawyer's adventures or listening to Bob Murphy call a game from Shea Stadium enlivens the imagination, whereas television frequently flattens it. TV homogenizes experience because it puts it all out there. With reading and the radio, the world grows more various because you have to participate.

Even so, in recent years, among the nicest evenings I've spent involved going to someone's house to see a Ken Burns documentary or a presidential debate. Yet these television epiphanies are, in my experience, rare. TV is immensely alluring and then too often disappointing. I read a newspaper or go for a run, and it stays with me. Two hours of television usually turns out to be an ephemeral experience.

So I've never bought a TV. A friend who was leaving town once left me his, but I didn't get around to hooking it up. Eventually, I gave it away. As for my mom, she brought home a television the year I went to college. (These days, she has a VCR too.) We've been instructed not to call during The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.

Nicholas Dawidoff is the author of The Catcher Was a Spy and In the Country of Country: People and Places in American Music.