Happy Birthday to US

I was just a kid. I wore an Uncle Sam costume my mom made, and my sister was Lady Liberty, complete with torch. My dad helped me rig up this old heavy wood-sided cart, and I painted each side with American flags. The cart was on hard rubber casters and didn’t move too good, but I was able to drag it with my sister in it the entire length of the Alpenfest parade that year of 1976, the Bicentennial.

My grandpa was busily reading through the Kent Family Chronicles paperbacks, novels about America’s founding by John Jakes. Enormous bestsellers. He kept them on a window sill in the front room of the cabin on Otsego Lake. They don’t make mass market paperbacks like these anymore, which I find very sad. But then, the size of the books were too large for me and I didn’t try to read them.

The Bicentennial was everywhere that year. Especially on TV. Back then, I thought TV was the greatest invention of all time, and my biggest ambition was to save enough money to buy a small portable B&W set so I would watch Count Zappula. Better, I wouldn’t have to watch my mom’s shows, like The Love Boat. Way too much kissing. Bring on The Muppet Show!

We had four channels, one of which seemed to belong to Mr Roger’s and England. Best thing was that you didn’t have to pay for any of these channels. Can you believe it? Just stick an antenna into the air and they “streamed” at no cost. My dad, then as now a sports fan, got to see all the events he enjoyed and didn’t have to “subscribe” to fourteen different services to get them. Streaming will wound, or even kill, sports, because it fragments audiences, who can’t keep up. Same thing happened to boxing when they began Pay-Per-View.

Having only four channels, and a handful of newspapers, made it a lot easier to keep things together. I emphasize the small number of outlets for information, because back them it seemed we were—no, not seemed, we definitely were—one people. As much as an endless land filled with two hundred plus millions of souls could be one people, that is. There were always divisions, of course, but weren’t of daily importance as they are now. Back then, we of course had many who broke into the country illegally, but this was then an mere annoyance. It only became a flood later under Equality. We are now no longer one people, but many peoples.

When we were one, it was technologically easier to be one. Easier to get the message out, which of course could go either way. But then, as much as it could, it went the right way a lot more often. And, as one, everybody got behind the Bicentennial. There was a great spirit of pride and, yes, fun in the air.

The cynical view is that people were cashing in, as people are always cashing in. Surely some were. Yet not all. There were great measures of sincerity, which were obvious. Even in the advertisements. The advertisers might not have believed the messages they were selling, but they knew their audiences did.

New ads are in your face, always featuring improbable, and even impossible, family scenarios, obviously designed to be inoffensive to the Hersterical Set. That they might be offensive to normal people doesn’t matter.

Besides those “That’s the Way it Was” sports, somebody had the bright idea of The Bicentennial Minute, a series of one-minute bursts or pure patriotism. They were so ubiquitous that parodies of them were made.

You couldn’t feature these today, not because there isn’t the channel for it, but because much of this history is now so ancient, and so untaught and so unfamiliar, that you may as well air segments on the early history of Athens. If anybody even attempted it, the ads would be DIE propaganda. Which nobody wants to see. Would any schoolchild today know “One if by land”, the Stamp Act, Continental Congress, Articles of Confederation. Benedict Arnold, Nathan Hale, Betsy Ross, Publius, or even John Hancock?

This is what the “news” did back then:

Unimaginable now. I mean that word in its full sense: you cannot imagine any “network” producing material like this today. All day long in San Francisco, the reporter said, San Francisco, there would be “parades and festivals and fireworks.” Will there be these delights this year in that city?

I loved TV when I was a boy, but I gradually shifted and became a radio guy, and still am.

Radio is dying, so is TV, and newspapers are as good as dead, even as ways to communicate expand. Maybe there’s a TikTok or Instamgram channel devoted to the Sesquicentennial, but I wouldn’t know it, since I have neither of apps. I blow all my time on Twitter, and haven’t seen much about the 250th there. Some carping from some lowlife actors or signers is all I can remember.

But it was festive in 1976, and we had a ball. We were all proud to be an American.

Many of us still are.

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