The First TV Show I Remember Watching

This week's Long & Short Reviews prompt is "The First TV Show I Remember Watching..."

...Was the weather updates in Macon, Georgia. (I am not Macon this up.) The fun stuff we expect from weather forecasts now hadn't been invented yet, and the forecasts weren't nearly as accurate as they are now, but there was a TV station in Macon that at least made their weather forecasts amusing. Their weather guessers had put together a set of little cartoon clouds and sun faces that romped across the screen during the boring news program my parents wanted to watch. I was charmed. It was a disappointment, a few years later, to be in Macon again and not be able to find that news and weather show again!

We caught that news and weather program while driving south to spend the obligatory month at my aunt's rental property. Real estate prices were so explosive in that part of Florida that special taxes were put on unoccupied rental properties, so whenever one of this aunt's properties was unoccupied, somebody had to spend January in it. It was more duty than pleasure. I always brought back shells and talked a good line about having to pick oranges off the tree in the yard and eat them with spoons, because nobody in Florida would even bother with the sort of pulpy dried-up oranges they send north...but I always liked snowy winters at home better than beach-weather winters in Florida. I think now it must have been because of the nasty stuff people sprayed in the hope of controlling the mosquitoes. I  knew they still had mosquitoes, because the mosquitoes bit Mother, but the mosquitoes never bothered me. The spray did.

Anyway during my first two winters in Florida, which were non-consecutive, my grandmother was living with my aunt; she tutored me before and after the programs I was allowed to watch came on TV--"Romper Room," "Lassie," "Mrs. Beasley," and at least once I was invited to stay in the evening and watch "Hee Haw," which ran up to my bedtime so I fell asleep during the show. Another time I was invited to watch an original Lucille Ball show; the jokes went over my head. Sometimes I caught a bit of the news and weather shows. A couple of times nobody interfered with my watching a few minutes of Flip Wilson or "Bewitched," but I wasn't supposed to watch those. "Mr. Ed," the actual show with the horse who supposedly talked, had been broadcast before but was not broadcast during those winters. 

Everybody remembers "Lassie" but apparently not all baby-boomers remember "Romper Room" and "Mrs. Beasley." They were the educational programs before "Sesame Street." I remember those shows because I had tie-ins to remind me of them during my ordinary TV-free life. There was a storybook about "Romper Room" and a talking doll who recited eight or ten of Mrs. Beasley's lines. I don't remember the actual TV programs, and suppose they were probably uninspired, but it was fun to pull Mrs. Beasley's string and see whether she'd say something boring, or one of her "fun" lines--"If you had three wishes, what would you wish for?" or "It would be such fun to play jump rope, don't you think?"

Much more than the TV programs, I remember Grandmother. For one thing she had been a more competent child and had more interesting adventures than that pitiful little Timmy on "Lassie." By the time I came along, being an untreated celiac had made her a difficult-to-treat diabetic patient; she'd lost a leg to the disease but she could still thread needles and sew, insist that pans of vegetables be brought to her so she could cut up veg for meals, sing old songs--on key--and teach all the elementary school subjects, with the best. She remembered the horses she used to ride, by name, and told stories about them. She spoke Tex-Mex Spanish, and Texas German, and even some bits of Texas Cherokee. She had been a horse trainer, a telephone operator, a dressmaker, and a school housemother while doing ordinary things like farming and raising children--more than two dozen foster children, actually--and having a physical disability. TV broke up the monotony of being ill, she said, and she and I enjoyed it, but it was even better when she sat up and taught me things.