Thinking back to the late 1940s and early 1950s, when my gang of same-age pre-teen youngsters and I were first introduced to the miracle of television, I tend to remember the events surrounding those shows as much as I recall the actual TV shows themselves.

In Larchmont, New York, the post-world War II period had just set in, the soldiers had returned from Europe, and Normandy Lane, my particular neighborhood, together with each of the other Westchester neighborhoods, was suddenly littered with little kids. In that infancy of television, not everyone had a TV set at once, so we kids alternated among the families that did. First, we visited the Daitches, then the Hunts, then the Bellamies, then the Wilsons. We were always welcome, because the only program we wanted to watch was the only program that was on at 5:30 p.m., and that was the half-hour-long "Howdy Doody," ending in plenty of time for the evening dinner at 6. Until 5 p.m, there was nothing on but a test pattern, an unwavering kind of Maltese cross with an accompanying low buzz. In those days, there was no such thing as afternoon TV… or, so far as that's concerned, morning or very late-night TV either. The plots of those unwavering patterns were, I soon discovered, very, very weak.

Bunnie Wilson was a boy whose parents really shouldn't have named him that. I don't, that is, remember a time when we kids didn't meet him without pushing our faces into his own and twitching our noses, called out, "Hi, Bunny. Want some carrots?" (We kids could be really cruel. If I were his Mom or Dad, I wouldn't have let him play with us.) His mother seemed never to emerge from her second-story bedroom; and his father, Winston Wilson, was the manager of the Club 21 an elegant watering hole in Manhattan, and so didn't come home until very early in the morning, at which time, I could usually hear his black Cadillac DeVille drive down his driveway, Mr. Wilson get out, open the garage door, get back in, and drive the rest of the way indoors.

When it was Bunnie's turn to host the neighborhood kids for "Howdy Doody," we all gathered at his front door. When he opened the door to let us in, instead of leading us upstairs, to one bedroom or another, where ours was located, he shepherded us all across the hall and into the basement. What, in heaven's name, I wondered, was a TV set doing in someone's basement? Well, I soon found out. Most of Bunny's basement was all tricked out as a bar, a la Club 21, with stools and a huge marble bar the length of the room, a TV installed above it, and lots of pictures lining the walls of the whole room.

There were pinball games and vending machines. But it was the pictures that, for the most part, caught the boys' attention. There must have been 20, at least, and each one was a roughly 18' by 36" nude girl. Now, we we! re about 10 or 12, and nude girls were something of a rarity … this being the late1940's, when the United States (before Playboy) was still something of a puritanical country. As I recall, we stood transfixed by the nude pictures of these girls, each of them of an age before gravity had taken its toll. I don't remember what happened on "Howdy Doody" that evening, but I do remember that when we kids got home that evening, I told my Mom what I had seen, and she remarked that maybe that parental faux-pas by the Wilsons might cancel out the outrage Mrs. Wilson claimed she felt when she phoned my mother, some months earlier, to complain to her that I had used inappropriate language around her son Bunny, who was completely innocent of that kind of language.

My sister Beverly and I, when she was about one year old, and I was six, had an elderly and sweet babysitter, Mrs. Thompson, whose husband George used to accompany her to our house, when my parents were going out for the evening. Like a million-and-one other TV viewers of that era, George Thompson liked wrestling on TV, especially the spectacle of Gorgeous George, in all his splendor. What set George Thompson apart from the other million-and-one other viewers, however, was that he took all the shenanigans very seriously. Especially when Gorgeous George was in the ring, pitted, as he always was, against a sneaky, outrageously unfair, downright dirty opponent, Mr. Thompson got positively red in the face and hurled insults at the black-and-white TV set.

Our TV was in the dining room, in those days, and, while her husband was on his feet, about ready to have a seizure in the next room, his wife was seated in the nearby livingroom sewing something or other for their children for Christmas. "Now, George," she would warn, "don't get so excited; it's only a game!" But, just as George was about to fall afoul of this "game," Gorgeous George would rally, pin his devilish and sleazy opponent, and rise from the mat, his arms raised in triumph above his head, to thunderous applause from the audience, all of which allowed the blood in George's face to drain away until the next Friday night.

I believe George Thompson went to his grave believing in the inviolability and incorruptibility of TV wrestling.

The actress Sigourney Weaver's father Pat was a high-ranking executive at NBC when, in the early 1950's, he developed the idea for an early-morning "Today Show," for which the corporation found the likeable, easy-going Dave Garroway, to moderate the show, in the same way Katie Couric and Matt Lauer moderate the same show today. Yesteryear's show had an interaction with the crowd of New Yorkers walking on their way to work, but Couric and Lauer are actually, at times, in the actual crowd, whereas their ancestor Garroway was separated from the crowd by a plate glass window.

Except for the Korean War, which lasted from June of 1950 until ! the early 1960's, there didn't seem to be any disasters that a U.S. TV news show needed to tend to post haste, and maybe that was the reason for the appearance of J. Fred Muggs on the "Today Show." J. Fred, you see, was a full-grown chimpanzee who used to hang around Dave's neck and perform the various bizarre antics that chimps are wont to do, in front of the NBC cameras, which were hungry for his utmost antics. I was struck by the peculiarity of J. Fred's name, its uniqueness. Then, it suddenly occurred to me that the name of my neighbor directly across the street, in Normandy Lane, in suburban New Rochelle, New York, was J. Fred Coots, the song writer who had written, among many other songs, "You Go To My Head," "Love Letters in the Sand," and the perennial favorite "Santa Claus is Coming to Town." Was Dave's chimp's name a slam against J. Fred Coots? And if so, why? I still, after fully half a century, have trouble believing the near identity of the names Coots and Muggs was purely coincidental, but I never heard a peep from Coots to the contrary.

In TV's early days -- and by that I mean the early 1950's; I know TV was invented much earlier, but regularly scheduled broadcasts came only much later -- not only were broadcasts aired only during certain times during the day, the networks were desperate for programs to broadcast. I remember, for example, hearing, on New York's Channel 11, a plea for scripts and stories from listeners. A few months ago, I received in the mail a large catalogue of remaindered books and "Classic Cliffhanger" double-disc movies. And there, amidst all the films I either didn't want to see for the first time or those I'd seen and couldn't recommend, was "Tim Tyler's Luck," a 1930's-era serial movie that I'd seen in my childhood on a local TV station. Now we all mock and laugh at the idea of Saturday afternoon cliff-hangers, but when I was a child, they really took me in; I was transfixed. The notes on the film's cardboard cover explain the story: "Tim Tyler (Frankie Thomas) takes a trip to Africa to search for his father, a noted scientist who had gone to gorilla country to continue his research. Tim stows away on a river steamer, where he meets a beautiful young woman named Lora Lacey (Frances Robinson), who is on a quest of her own. She is seeking a notorious criminal named Spider Webb (Norman Willis), a long-time adversary of Tyler, and perpetrator of a diamond theft for which Lora's brother was framed." And on and on it goes, for 12 exciting, cliff-hanging episodes. The box the film comes in depicts, a la King Kong, or Rhett Butler, in "Gone With The Wind,"a very large gorilla carrying a presumably comatose Lora in the outstretched and welcoming arms of a gigantic guy in a gorilla outfit.

From Episode One ("Jungle Pirates") to Episode Twelve ("The Kimberly Diamonds"), I was utterly enthralled, and continue to be enthralled every time I play it, especially when Spider Webb, with an unsightly growth of dark beard, came driving up in his fancy and fast Spider Mobile, for the purpose of kidnapping some unsuspecting schnook who has dozens of large diamonds in his coat pocket, or to kidnap some beautiful, blonde girl for who knows what unseemly purpose. These are the times when Tim Tyler lies unconscious from a potent drink he's been given.

These days, when copyrights have expired and the serials themselves are universally considered inappropriate for any TV at all, you can pick up yesteryear's TV serials and shows, even the old Sid Caesar/Imogene Coca, "Your Show of Shows," for pennies.

Oh, be still, my heart!