Media Rituals and Memory: Exploring the Historical Phenomenology of American Local Television

Abstract

For more than two decades during the mid-20th century, local entertainment television shaped daily experience across the United States. Although often viewed as trivial by historians, these extinct television genres offer valuable insights into the relationship among media technology, historical consciousness, and cultural memory. Emergent theories of historical phenomenology help facilitate and expand such insights. The phenomenological perspective, which focuses on the sensory experience of media technology in historical settings, illustrates how audience memories inform the historical significance of this programming. The present study utilizes insights from ethnographic data and historical recordings to fortify its findings.

Keywords

cultural memory media and memory media rituals historical phenomenology television history local television

In the early 1980s, as personal video-recording technology became widespread, a common scenario played out at hundreds of local television stations across the United States. Typically, the stations received phone calls or correspondence from enthusiastic former viewers seeking recordings of locally produced entertainment programs from the mid-20th century. These hosted programs included children’s cartoon shows, hosted horror programs, and local music programs or dance parties. Across geography, responses varied little: Stations not only failed to record these programs, few stations even documented—much less archived—such programs. Indeed, the experience of early television, particularly local television, has proven distressingly ephemeral. Initially, it appeared that other than memories, nothing remained of the countless local entertainment programs that filled America’s airwaves from the 1950s through the 1970s. Over time, however, this observation proved to be only partially true. With the advent of Internet technology in the 1990s, scores of local television tributes sites began appearing on Internet venues and, later, social media. Moreover, participants shared more than memories on these forums; many also shared thought-to-be-lost physical artifacts ranging from photographs to personally maintained recordings. This widespread phenomenon continues to this day.

Given the ephemeral qualities of early television, such mnemonic practices offer valuable insights to both media studies and memory studies. The present research examines two interrelated questions that inform this situation: In this context, how do cultural groups generate frameworks of memory that are based upon mediated experiences, and what do these practices tell researchers about the historical significance of local entertainment television? To help answer these questions, the analysis conceptualizes the attendant issues through the rubric of historical phenomenology, an underutilized approach that focuses on sensory experience during a specific historical past (Curran & Kearney, 2012). From this perspective, early local television in the United States offers an insightful case study that informs the fluid and evolving relationship among mediated experience, culture, and memory. Such findings also will better delineate the historical significance of early local television genres.

For nearly two decades during the mid-20th century, local entertainment television shaped daily experience across the United States. Historical television listings indicate that from the 1950s through the 1970s, nearly all of America’s more than 500 local television stations broadcast several hours of such programming each day, an amount that comprises more than 10 million hours of discrete local programming over a quarter-century. Moreover, even as these programs were local, they were notably similar across the entire United States. That is, regardless of locale or market size, each genre featured similar characters and formats. Although broadcasters designed these programs as a cost-effective means of filling airtime and selling advertising, early local television also provided a temporal and performative framework that situated experience in time and space. As part of early television’s broader social impact, these attributes created “a nucleus for social life and peoples’ construction of meaningful life experiences” (Adams, 1992, p. 126). Consequently, in ways that exceeded intent, these programs established a locus of embodied experience that American audiences perceived and remembered as personal, local, and historical.

To better conceptualize this phenomenon, theories of historical phenomenology complement theories of television memory and media rituals. This synergistic orientation not only examines the sensory experience of historical artifacts and conditions, it simultaneously considers how audiences ascribed patterns and values to these experiences. These insights shed light on how audiences valued local entertainment television when it originally aired, and how these experiences shaped perceptions and memories of mid-20th century American life. The ensuing four-part analysis posits that because audiences were vital participants in performing the phenomenology of early local television, ethnographic data is of particular value to the study.

Literature Review

In recent years several lines of scholarship have sought to characterize television memory. These studies portray a contingent and evolving phenomenon that involves “the everyday-ness, the routine, the habits, the rituals and the always-there-visible-invisibility of television in people’s lives” (Gorton & Garde-Hanson, 2019, p. 3). This orientation naturally addresses the interplay among individual viewers, culture, and evolving media technology (Holdsworth, 2011, pp. 3–5). As part of efforts to situate such insights, television memory researchers often credit van Dijck (2004, 2007) for developing “the first comprehensive paradigm of ‘mediated memory’” (Garde-Hansen, 2011, p. 25). van Dijck (2004), portrayed media engagement and reception as a form of cultural memory, and van Dijck explained how media technology helps individuals “make sense of their lives in relation to the lives of others and to their cultural context, situating themselves in time and place” (p. 262). To expand this perspective, van Dijck surveyed the varied manners in which modern audiences use media technology to index experiences and inscribe these experiences to facilitate future recall. Even in light of the emergent insights, however, Gorton and Garde-Hansen (2019) identified an overarching concern: “As academics, we noticed a scholarly gap in critically using memories as a way of explaining the past and valuing television’s role within both tangible and intangible cultural heritage, place heritage, personal identity and life story” (p. 15).

Emergent theories of historical phenomenology can help address such gaps and facilitate a deeper understanding of television memory. Even as the phenomenology movement reached its pinnacle in the mid-20th century, its efforts to unify the extremes of subjectivism and objectivism have evolved in recent decades (Gallagher, 2012, pp. 82–99). Smith (1999) introduced historical phenomenology as a contemporary approach to studying feeling and sensation in specific historical settings. Curran and Kearney (2012, p. 354) identify two premises associated with this orientation: First, feeling and sensing have a history; that is, all feelings and experiences occur in “distinct cultural, institutional, and discursive contexts.” For example, nineteenth-century American Vaudeville audiences experienced sadness, fatigue, sounds, and smells differently from the way contemporary social-media cultures experience these phenomena. Second, sense and bodily experiences, because they resist objectification, are not historical artifacts in a material sense. Historical phenomenology, therefore, abandons neat distinctions between persons and things and “embraces the dynamism and nebulousness of feeling and sensation and by thinking in terms of ecologies rather than artifacts, experiences rather than objects” (Curran & Kearney, 2012, p. 354). From this perspective, phenomena such as sensations, feelings, emotions, and aesthetic pleasure become central to historical inquiry.

Accordingly, a historical phenomenology of mediated experience focuses on the emotions, the senses, and the bodily experience of media technology in particular historical settings. In the present context, for example, broadcast television represented the primary source of early video technology, which revolutionized the relationship between media and sensory experience. McCluhan (1964) discussed these attributes in terms of “hot” and “cool” media, a distinction that implicates sensory engagement and audience participation with each technology. McCluhan (pp. 22–25) classified television as a “cool” medium because television required more active audience participation in the construction of meaning. Although not all media scholars endorse McCluhan’s premises, other noted researchers such as Gerbner (1998) highlight how television creates such an immersive experience that the medium creates a reality of its own. Ultimately, this mediated reality results in shared stories that shape how people perceive and remember culture.

From either perspective, the medium of television is more than its messages. Viewers’ experiences of early television involved “the interplay between television as a visual medium and a material object” (Holdsworth, 2011, p. 3). This reality included auditory and visual engagement of a television receiver in a predictable, situated setting (i.e., typically a living space within a home). Moreover, because of the nature of broadcast schedules, the experience of early television not only was rigidly structured in time, it also involved embodied experience to include bodily position, physical location, social interaction, and even relationships with food. From a phenomenological perspective, such sensory and emotional engagement may reflect individual experiences, but such experiences are not idiosyncratic. Rather, phenomenological constructionism portrays consciousness as a subjective but “identifiable stance emanating from collective rules” (Anderson, 1996, p. 39). This perspective accounts for how individual experiences are interpreted and shared in social contexts, and how these shared experiences often become the locus of cultural experience. In the context of the present study, these factors shape television memory in the way Holdsworth (p. 25) describes:

These are not memories of the detail of the programmes […] neither are they purely memories of the context, but they are an interplay between the two and the sense impression left by the play of light, texture, colour, sound, and temperature.

Theories of communication as ritual (Rothenbuhler, 1998) further illustrate how such “interplay” influences the presentation and reception of all media technologies. Rothenbuhler emphasizes that all rituals involve ‘‘the voluntary performance of appropriately patterned behavior to symbolically effect or participate in the serious life” (p. 27). Accordingly, individuals actively engage in collective ritual activities, which are characterized by their appeal to symbols, values, patterned behavior, and structured performances. This process naturally involves both sharing meaning and structuring sensory experience in time and space. In accordance with Erll (2011), this performative orientation helps reveal how television viewers act as “carriers of cultural memory who share in collective images and narratives of the past, practice mnemonic rituals, [and] display an inherited habitus” (p. 12).

In the latter respect, Rothenbuhler (1998, pp. 26–27) argues that rituals reflect a “generative logic” that underscores the relationship between a culture’s rituals and its aesthetics. Rothenbuhler explains that in accordance with this logic, “appropriately patterned behavior implies the performance of rules and a script not authored by the actor” (p. 26). Accordingly, audiences engage in acts of incorporation that comprise auditory, visual, gestural, and temporal rhetorics, all of which structure the performance and reception of rituals. As reflectors of their social importance, such performances provide a framework for understanding, localizing, and valuing experience. From this applied perspective, these phenomena include physical acts, sensory experiences, acts of communication, and political performances. The latter involves acts that are performed “because of other people […] with, for and to” (Curran & Kearney, 2012, p. 356). Rothenbuhler’s emphasis on seriousness is significant in the context of popular-culture rituals, which often fall prey to being perceived as trivial. Far from trivial, however, such mediated rituals constituted a phenomenology of early local television that oriented several generations of Americans in time and space.

For the reasons Fiske (2011, pp. 63–72) outlined, audience ethnographies offer an insightful perspective that “reminds us that actual people in actual situations watch and enjoy actual television programs” (p. 63). Accordingly, ethnographic data from online tribute forums help identify the social practices that shaped the experience and memory of early local television in the United States. In critical ways, these extinct television programs created the structure necessary to index cultural experience across the nation during the mid-20th century. The ethnographic data not only helps illuminate the historical relationship among bodily experience, media rituals, and cultural memory, ethnographic data also informs the performative rhetorics associated with incorporating and inscribing local television rituals. The analysis gains such insights by examining an array of artifacts to include more than 50 historical recordings and ethnographic data from dozens of online tribute venues. These artifacts reveal both the performative structure of each historical program and the manners in which contemporary audiences invoke these rhetorics to share memories of these programs. This orientation better demonstrates how early television rituals established a locus of bodily experience during this era. Ultimately, these experiences created a framework for cultural memory that remains evident today.

Local Television Rituals

The first generation of local television differed from other media forms and experiences, both historical and contemporary. Many of these differences trace to early local television’s dependency on over-the-air transmission and clock-like programming schedules, which cumulatively created a mediated experience that was distinctively visual, auditory, interactive, and situated in time and space. Cumulatively, these realities contribute to the real-time “phenomenal now” that characterizes live broadcasting (Scannell, 2004, p. 132). This factor was particularly evident in early local television because, prior to the 1970s, little prepackaged programming was available to help broadcasters fill the broadcast day. Consequently, local broadcasters filled several hours of airtime each day by hosting live programming in the studio. Moreover, most local television markets comprised only three or four stations, and viewers were dependent on programmers’ schedules and offerings. Furthermore, early television technology lacked mobility; television receivers generally were placed in fixed locations within homes. Such social-technological relationships ultimately positioned local entertainment television as a vehicle for not merely inscribing social experience, but also for incorporating it through structured, value-laden performative acts.

When television rituals are constructed and performed, “space and time are inextricably intertwined” (Silverstone, 1994, p. 36). To understand how such mediated rituals construct the bodily experience of physical space, therefore, it is necessary to understand the temporal orientation of television within the home. In notable ways, American local television emphasized stability and continuity in terms of the clock and calendar; ultimately, this reality helped orient viewers for decades. Local television tribute websites from across the nation include many accounts of how this phenomenon shaped the daily experiences of local television viewers for decades. For example, fans of a memorable local children’s show in Miami, Florida, recall daily rituals that structured their days: “Getting ready for school was not complete without The Skipper Chuck Show” (Helmlinger, 2008). A fan of an Indianapolis, Indiana hosted-horror program similarly recounts: “Growing up and going to school in Indiana, I was always happy when Friday arrived. It meant no school for two days, and it was time for [horror host] Sammy Terry in the evening” (Driskell, 2016).

These time-based rituals did not occur by happenstance. Rather, the practices reflected promotional strategies that broadcasters designed to create local viewing communities and attract advertisers. This interplay among technology, economics, and culture resulted in two revealing phenomena: First, all local television genres structured and incorporated their rituals in terms of temporal, visual, and auditory rhetorics (i.e., structured delimiters of value); second, these local practices proved uniform across geography. Consequently, local television rituals became an integral part of American culture from the 1950s through the 1970s. Surviving recordings and other historical artifacts reveal the manner and extent to which broadcasters capitalized on these circumstances. This evidence illustrates how early local television stations catered to local audiences by building viewing rituals around local personalities and incorporating these rituals with distinctive performative rhetorics. These strategies were evident in the programming’s content, pacing, and sheer predictability. Nearly all children’s shows, for example, featured an introduction, a cartoon, in-studio activity, another cartoon, more in-studio activity, etc. Music programs and hosted horror programs comprised similar cyclical formats.

Such situated and predictable structure naturally accommodated temporal rhetorics. As Scannell (2004, p. 133) notes: “Broadcasting elides the temporal specificity of days, their primordial existential structure and rhythm.” In this respect, local broadcasters capitalized on the cyclical qualities of the clock and calendar in both daily programs such as children’s shows and weekly programs such as hosted horror series and dance parties. Broadcasters structured children’s programs around weekday school schedules, whereas locally hosted horror series defined weekend late-night television rituals across the nation. Horror series usually appeared late on Friday or Saturday nights, times when viewers could stay up late, and networks offered few viewing alternatives. In contrast to network programming, which followed a September-May broadcast season and usually employed reruns or seasonal replacements, local entertainment programs were continuous year around. Local entertainment television emphasized stability and temporal continuity—all programs were situated in time and experienced in the moment.

Historical recordings indicate that, across genres, local hosts emphasized the cyclical, continuous experience of their respective programs. Hosts of daily programs, for example, routinely acknowledged the day of the week (e.g., “Have a great weekend. I’ll see you again on Monday”) and they often developed programs around annual events such as seasonal holidays and locally significant events and anniversaries. Hollis (2001) documented local variations of such calendrical rituals. For example, a western-themed program on WIS-TV, Columbia, South Carolina was interrupted at precisely 5:42 p.m. each day when the noisy, but never seen, “5:42 Posse” galloped past (Hollis, 2001, pp. 174, 251). Similarly, a fan of a 1960s children’s program in Cedar Rapids, Iowa recalled: “Years before I started kindergarten, I couldn't tell time yet, but I knew what 4:00 in the afternoon looked like, because that's when Dr. Max came on” (Frogbrain62, 2016). Other tribute-site respondents associated such calendrical rituals with personal rituals, many of which involved the tactile experience of specific food: “We used to watch his show [Sammy Terry] every Friday night while eating a Bob's Tu Your Door pizza” (Qualls, 2015). Such temporal rituals reflect the integral relationship among the experience of time and the auditory and bodily performances implicit in all local entertainment programs.

Auditory rhetorics comprised verbal utterances, music, and sound effects. Each program’s host typically presided over these structured auditory rituals in ways that transformed the television studio set into a readily identifiable ceremonial site. In this role, the host verbally set the tone for the program and, in the process, often used taglines to denote temporal boundaries for on-air rituals. Harry Martin of KCRA-TV in Sacramento, California, opened his program with a tagline: “Captain Sacto calling control tower. Tell the kids I’m coming in” (KCRA 40th, 1995). Horror hosts similarly filled their programs with macabre-but-campy taglines. In Cleveland, Ohio, horror host Ernie “Ghoulardi” Anderson created commercially successful catchphrases such as “turn blue” and “stay sick.” Many local hosts such as the original “Svengoolie,” as portrayed by Jerry G. Bishop on WFLD-TV in Chicago, Illinois, employed ritualized songs or poems to open or close programs (Archive Annex, 2015):

The time has come for scary things

Like monsters, ghosts and vampire wings

And horrible movies all drip-y and drool-y

And horrible hosts like me – Svengoolie

Such auditory rhetorics typically were closely associated with visual rhetorics. Many local children’s programs employed participative call and response rituals similar to WPIX-TV’s Bill “Johnny Jellybean” Britten, who each day ritualistically cued his in-studio audience to sing the program’s special “Jellybeaner” song (Rilowite, 2015). Scores of horror movie hosts entered and exited their programs by entering a crypt through a creaky door or opening and closing themselves in a coffin. Ernie “Captain Ernie” Mims, WOC-TV [now KWQC-TV], Davenport, Iowa punctuated program transitions with piercing blasts on his steamboat’s whistle (IowaPublicTelevision, 2010). Horror host John “Zacherley” Zacherle gained national media recognition for ritualistically cutting into the ongoing horror movie and inserting action of Zacherle’s character mocking the film itself (“Spoofing,” 1958).

Even as it is useful to identify specific sensory rhetorics to support the analysis, it is important to emphasize that the audience experienced these presentations as a multi-sensory gestalt. Viewers of Ghoulardi, for example, visually engaged the horror host as a glowing face on a television receiver, an effect that technicians carefully choreographed. Ghoulardi was broadcast from a darkened studio set and appeared only via a ghoul-lit, medium close-up shot that was positioned within a glowing, undulating oval. The surreal scene was accentuated by hip rhythm and blues or jazz music, and this auditory experience shaped the perception of Ghoulardi’s irreverent commentary and taglines. The experience of Ghoulardi, then, was cumulative: Viewers experienced the program temporally as a Friday night ritual in Cleveland, Ohio, from 1963-1966. The weekly event involved the bodily experience of sitting or lying in a viewing area within a familiar location at a prescribed time. Then, the program itself was structured as a multi-sensory spectacle that viewers experienced in real-time as a whole, more so than the sum of its parts.

Incorporating Local Television

Piper (2015) raised a broader concern that impacts the present analysis: “Formal histories of television and broadcasting have attended more assiduously to the ‘big picture’ than to the micro possibilities of engagement, avoiding the question of what television has meant [to its viewers]” (p. 123). Historical phenomenology engages this concern by positing an ecology of experiences that implicates viewers in both technological inscription and bodily incorporative practices. In both contexts, local television rituals created a circuit of cultural memory that capitalized on this overlapping relationship and allowed viewers to become “carriers of memories” (Erll, 2011). To underscore this point, Stone (1995) explains how communication technology serves as an electronic prosthesis of sorts; it facilitates embodied performances that transform both social interaction and personal identity. These relationships blur the boundaries among social actors, performative rituals, ceremonial sites, incorporation, and inscription. Over time early local television viewers have negotiated these relationships in revealing ways, all of which inform the social experience of television before the expansion of cable television and personal video recorders.

In the manners described previously, broadcasters incorporated television rituals within their ceremonial site (i.e., the television studio), but these efforts were unfocused outside of that venue. For example, viewers of the Dr. Max Show in eastern Iowa may have adhered to the host’s “rules for the day,” which included prescriptions such as “clean up my plate” and “be kind to others and animals” (“My Important Book,” 1966). Alternatively, some fans of outer-space programs describe ritualistically donning space-traveler gear while watching their local interplanetary heroes. Such rituals vary from the sorts of incorporation practices typically associated with face-to-face interaction. Most early television viewers engaged incorporation rituals in a mediated setting, one in which the television receiver acted as a social prosthesis. This situation allowed for degrees of social engagement; however, it provided little structured reinforcement. Moreover, if incorporation practices were unfocused, inscription practices were equally neglected. Remarkably few stations recorded or even documented this programming and, although promotional material may have inscribed some of its rituals, no formal mechanisms maintained this material. Yet, over time, many audience members engaged the sensory qualities of early television to fill this void.

Local television allowed viewers the sensory experience of peering through a cathode ray tube into a magical world, yet one that was eminently interactive and local. Viewers could see the artwork they had sent in and hear their names being read over the air. Hosts refined this effect not only through viewer mail rituals but also through pervasive appeals to local situations. In these respects, local programs differed from network fare in important ways. Most significant, local television rituals sometimes were genuinely social versus parasocial. Local hosts routinely cited the names of actual viewers as they spoke to them through the glowing window. Viewers also could meet on-air hosts face-to-face as part of frequent promotional appearances or chance encounters in public. Furthermore, viewers routinely appeared on such programs as participants, or they often could recognize friends who appeared on-air. Viewers also could identify with a host’s references to local landmarks, schools, and businesses.

Broadcasters capitalized on mail rituals to enhance this effect. Among the many examples, Lary “Pete the Pirate” Lewman of WBAL-TV in Baltimore, Maryland, unfurled a scroll listing the letter writers who would serve as his schooner’s crew for the day (Lewman, 1963). Chuck Acri, a sponsor-host of an Illinois-based horror series in the 1970s, ceremoniously toasted each week’s best viewer submissions as the “Creeps of the Week” (Epland, 2006). Zacherle once asked fans from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to each send three human hairs to create a pillow for a program character, WCAU-TV received more than 20,000 contributions (Scrivani, 2012, p. 33). Most horror hosts similarly received extensive fan mail, which included thematic humor, artwork, and even grotesque items culled from biology labs and butcher shops (Watson, 2000, pp. 35, 62). Over time, fan-mail rituals proved to be a defining characteristic of all local entertainment genres, particularly in smaller television markets in which hosts could actively engage letter writers on air. Ultimately, fan mail rituals created a critical bridge that linked parasocial with reciprocal fan interaction. Lucero (2007), a fan of Jim “Vegas Vampire” Parker on KHBV-TV in Henderson, Nevada, exemplified this reality:

He [the Vegas Vampire] used to have this ritual of burning your letter if he liked you … and one night he starts reading my letter! I could not believe it. I started jumping up and down and screaming, “My letter!” I was waiting to see if he was going to burn it, and then it happened! Man, I was so happy that day.

Remembering Local Television

van Dijck (2004, 2007) explained how the memory of such mediated experiences involves both technological inscription of media artifacts and bodily incorporative practices that are present in the content and reception of media artifacts. In the context of historical local entertainment television, however, inscription processes have proven enigmatic yet revealing. Unlike many of the video-based technologies van Dijck described, early television generally did not accommodate technological inscription. During the first generation of television, video recording technology was costly, cumbersome, and unavailable for home use. Furthermore, few broadcasters perceived any enduring value in local programs; consequently, little of this programing was recorded. Nonetheless, many early television rituals were inscribed as promotional items (e.g., photographs, buttons, hats, etc.), which audiences collected and saved as a material means of indexing their experiences during that era. This vital relationship among mediated experience, incorporation, and inscription created the structure necessary for audiences to remember the ephemeral experience of early local television.

For these reasons, when local entertainment television began to disappear from America’s airwaves in the late 1970s, former viewers found few formal opportunities to remember these programs. This situation changed in the mid-1990s when Internet-based forums such as Usenet began appearing. Usenet archives indicate that beginning in 1994, participants created discussion threads that addressed local television programs and personalities. Steve Iverson, for example, organized a Usenet thread to honor Minneapolis, Minnesota children’s programs Axel and his Dog, WCCO-TV, and Lunch with Casey, WTCN-TV (S. Iverson, personal communication, August 26, 2014). Within a few years, Iverson and other Usenet moderators expanded these tributes to the rapidly growing Worldwide Web. For example, Mike Ransom created tulsatvmemories.com in 1998 to celebrate a 1970s science-fiction television program that aired from Tulsa, Oklahoma. As participation in the site increased, Ransom expanded the site to address numerous other Tulsa-area entertainment programs (Ransom, 2011). Over the next decade, dozens of similar tribute sites emerged spontaneously throughout the nation. These local television tributes, like the original programming itself, spanned geography and television genres, yet all reflect similar content and structure. With the emergence of Facebook and YouTube in the 2010s, local television tribute sites have shifted to these template-based and mobile-friendly online enterprises.

In all cases, these Internet-based tribute sites create a digital repository for cultural memory and ritual artifacts, many of which were submitted by site visitors. From the outset, the websites created this effect by appealing to the performative ecology of the original television rituals. Accordingly, tribute venues commonly invoke the temporal, auditory, and visual rhetorics that once shaped local television. Magoo (2018), for example, recalled how merely hearing the theme music and the announcer’s voice from WGN-TV’s Family Classics evoked memories of social life at a particular juncture in time and space:

Oh my God, it's a cold winter day, 3 p.m. Sunday afternoon, I'm inside nice and cozy… Dad's reading the Sun-Times, mom's cooking dinner … me in front of the TV with my TV Guide. Now they are all gone … but this brought back those wonderful Sunday late afternoons in Chicago during the 1960s.

Sonne-Price (2017), a participant on a San Francisco, California dance program Record Hop, further illustrates how a program’s rituals continue to index life experiences in a geographical and historical setting:

I danced there [on Record Hop] in 1963. I was from Blackford High School and was there with a boy from Del Mar. We entered the slow spotlight dance and won: What a thrill: I was a big hit when I went back to school.

Many fan narratives also reflect the emotional and interactive nature of their viewing experiences. Such social interaction occurred in both mediated and face-to-face contexts. Fans often evoke an array of sensory experiences when describing their appearances on local entertainment programs:

I was sitting at home, with my mother, and a friend, when my name was pulled from Casey's mailbag. More excitement than I can describe! I built a model train car, brought it in, played “red light, green light,” etc. Quite exciting. The next day, I got to describe it in front of my first grade class. I was a celebrity for a little while in my class (Oceanstreet, 2010).

Such anecdotes suggest that former viewers continue to associate these programs with meaningful embodied experiences that structured their daily routines for years. Children’s show tribute sites are replete with accounts of ‘‘running home from school’’ each day to meet with the host via television. Aguidoa’s (2009) experience of eating lunch revolved around such rituals: “I remember eating my lunch as Sheriff John ate his. And he would always say his prayers.” Other viewers similarly recount the tactile experience of bodily positions, furniture, and eating special foods: “[Doctor Madblood], Fridays at 8 p.m. usually found most of the family huddled around your show, popcorn in hand and having a great time” (Scot, 2002). Such accounts of feeling, valuing, and sensing seamlessly melded personal and social memories, particularly the manners in which such programs created era-defining family interaction:

This is a most special memory shared by my Dad and I. My Mom and brother went off to bed. We had one of those curving corner couches, and my Dad would lay on his side, with his head propped on his hand. I would be in the crook behind his legs. He would say, “shift.” We'd both get up, then he'd lay on his other side, and I'd jump behind his legs again. I always had a pillow with me to cover my eyes for particularly scary moments (Half Light, 2017).

Even in a nation that was struggling with the legacies of racial segregation, online memory sites indicate that many African Americans associated their experience of ethnicity with local entertainment programs. For example, Bradley (2014) paid tribute to southern California’s “Sheriff John” Rovick: “Sheriff John, you made a little Negro kid from LA happy on his 7th Birth Day! Now I am a 57-year-old African American man, husband, father, papa, law office owner. You made a difference in my life. Thanks for the years of love.” Rowe (2008) similarly equated the experience of ethnicity in time to local entertainment television, in this case, South Florida’s “Skipper” Chuck Zink: “My brother and I, two little Black kids, were on The Skipper Chuck Show and he treated us with all the warmth and love of an uncle.” Howard (2017), another African American viewer from Los Angeles, California offered similar praise to “Engineer Bill” Stulla:

I'm from the inner city and as a child have always loved Engineer Bill, in fact, I can't remember myself ever missing one of his television shows. I can remember him coming to our neighborhood (my mom knowing how much I loved him so she paid the unknown to me the required fee) he called my name to come up and win a prize I nearly fainted I was so overwhelmed!

Contemporary tribute websites, Facebook pages, and YouTube postings comprise thousands of similar testimonies from across the nation. These personal narratives consistently reflect the extent to which, in the eyes of former viewers, local entertainment programs epitomized their affective experience of this era. For example, Sullivan (2009), a former children’s show fan of Joe “Officer Joe” Bolton in New York City, recounted how a tribute site evoked emotions associated with history and geography:

I am watching with a tear in my eye recalling what a wonderful period I grew up in. Officer Joe was my hero. I was always up on the roof turning the antenna so I could be sure of the reception was as clear as it could be from my home in Wallingford, Connecticut. Man, was this emotional to watch for a 58 year old.

Online tribute sites also illustrate how participant inscription became a form of social incorporation—and vice versa. Such mnemonic practices reinforce Stone’s (1995) argument that time, space, social performance, and even the physical body itself, gain new meaning in such mediated environments. When remembering these programs, viewers often reference local geography and physical space within the home. Such testimonies illustrate how such programs served as a virtual respite. A fan of a long-running children’s show in Iowa addressed these affective qualities in personal terms: “Captain Ernie was the one bright spot I could count on in my day. No matter how things went in school, I knew Ernie was there for me when I got home” (Jackson, 2007).

In contrast to network or syndicated programming, many postings suggest that viewers perceived these programs as an extension of local experience during particular historical periods. Mead’s (2013) YouTube comment provides an example: “While in the army in Vietnam in 1969 you could not meet a fellow Clevelander without talking about Ghoulardi as others stood by wondering what the hell we were talking about.” A current resident of New Jersey alluded to a distinctive verbal-gestural ritual that defined a Tulsa, Oklahoma program: “I love trying to explain the Mazeppa show to people, you had to live in Tulsa and you had to see it. On your belly, on your back, on your belly” (Allsop, 2003). Katana’s (2012) YouTube posting likewise explains how a local horror series shaped life in New Orleans, Louisiana, during the 1960s:

Prof Morgus belongs to Nawlins as much as red beans/rice and po-boys. I remember watching Morgus while Hurricane Betsy was a-blowing in 65. In 69 he was telling us about Camile. You can take the boy out of Nawlins, but you ain’t taking Nawlins out of the man.

As audiences engaged these virtual tributes, website visitors began sharing material artifacts of this programming, almost all of which fans had maintained for decades in drawers, closets, basements, and attics. These thought-to-be-lost artifacts included photographs, promotional items, and, in some cases, homemade recordings. Each site created a virtual gathering place that attracted up to thousands of visitors annually. Audience contributions, as with the tribute sites themselves, reflect similarity in content, structure, and appearance. Online contributors consistently describe their artifacts as very personal keepsakes, which sat dormant in their homes for decades. In many instances, artifacts survived many spring cleanings and, in some cases, geographic moves. The present research, for example, discovered and digitized eight hours of circa 1971 off-air audio recordings that a former fan had stored and moved for 35 years (Epland, 2006). Such collections, all of which individuals assembled separate from monetary concerns, attest to the ritual value of this programming. In effect, each time a fan saved such media artifacts in this manner, the act invoked the historical phenomenology implicit in the artifact. Simultaneously, the communal act of sharing the artifacts incorporates the phenomenology at a social level.

Such communal acts seamlessly evoke the affective and sensory ecology of the original television rituals. As with any significant cultural ritual, “engagement” becomes a vital principle. Viewers not only engaged these programs as part of structured experiences that defined a historical period, but tribute site visitors also engage program rhetorics via acts of seeing, hearing, and sharing experiences in contemporary forums. It remains important to reemphasize that this form of social engagement also has occurred in mediated and face-to-face settings. Even before the emergence of Internet technology, many long-retired television hosts recounted feeling gratified each time a former viewer recognized him or her and produced a treasured artifact that evoked program rituals. A few years before his death in 1983, for example, former San Francisco children’s show host Jay “Marshal J” Alexander described such an encounter: “Imagine that, he must have kept that badge in a drawer or something for fifteen years” (King, 1978, p. 3). Four decades later, similar historical testimonies and artifacts testify to the individual and collective experience of early local television, a phenomenon that reflects a significant ecology of experience across time, geography, and culture.

Conclusion

The case of American local entertainment television provides a revealing piece of a bigger puzzle that addresses media technology, history, and cultural memory. In particular, these historical television programs help better illuminate the sensory and performative aspects of mediated memory. Several findings stand out in this regard: Early local television across the United States was structured, presented, and engaged in terms of rituals, all of which reflected the historical phenomenology implicit in a particular era. Although this reality reflected commercial concerns, local television rituals comprised an array of incorporative rhetorics that integrated both mediated and face-to-face experience. These rhetorics, which ultimately transcended their commercial origins, were performed as part of the programs themselves and also were animated by audience members through the experience of viewing each program. As the preceding findings demonstrate, these temporal, visual, and auditory rhetorics provided the framework for situating cultural and individual experience in time and space. Accordingly, early local television proved vital in shaping how a generation of Americans experienced and continue to remember life in the mid-20th century.

The present study intentionally avoided theories of nostalgia to characterize these social-technological dynamics. Nostalgic impulses are present in most memories of local entertainment television; however, to conceptualize these memories as nostalgia tends to paint the situation with too broad of a brush. Theories of nostalgia do not address why and how audiences engaged these programs when they aired, nor does nostalgia account for why audiences originally saved artifacts of these programs. Therefore, it becomes more useful to conceptualize memory of local television in terms of the “traveling histories” that Erll (2011) described. These memories reflect a continuous phenomenon rather than one oriented purely on the past. To the degree that nostalgia is present, it reflects a desire to re-engage the historical phenomenology associated with local entertainment television. The cited testimonies of former viewers reinforce this perspective. From day one, local television rituals were—and continue to be—motivated and sustained by desires for continuity and locatedness. These findings also support van Dijck’s (2004, p. 272) observation that cultural memory is “less a process of recalling than a topological skill, the ability to locate and identify pieces of culture that identify the place of self in relation to others.” Early local television, therefore, is noteworthy for creating a nexus of cultural experience that fostered these relationships. In accordance with van Dijck (2004), viewers’ acts of engaging this television aesthetic proved to be as much an act of “creation as it is re-creation” (p. 272).

Although early local television sheds new light on such issues, the attendant insights also reflect caveats and limitations. As a historical phenomenon, local entertainment television in the United States was the product of particular technological and social conditions; its rituals could not be sustained as these conditions evolved. Accordingly, the demise of American local entertainment television traces to the mid-1970s when the proliferation of channels associated with cable television redefined geography and brought more choices to viewers. Personal video recorders and time-shift recording intensified these trends over time. This reality highlights the need to better acknowledge that technology impacts how memories travel across time, space, and culture. For example, early radio rituals—although significant in their way—could not facilitate visual rhetorics and, therefore, were experienced and remembered differently. Early local television proved distinctive in this regard: Its historical and cultural significance relates to how its incorporative practices reflected a fuller spectrum of sensory experiences. Furthermore, the case suggests that a phenomenology of mediated experiences can never truly be inscribed for a key reason: Inscription cannot capture the temporal element of a mediated experience. Only an experiencing subject can access the latter phenomenon, and this factor underscores the value of ethnographic data to such inquiry.

Given that in recent decades media technology has become increasingly converged and interactive, the previously cited relationships are continually evolving. Audiences now exert great control over inscription and incorporation, and these realities alter the nature of mediated experiences, rituals, and memories. Even in historical contexts, the social and technological dynamics associated with localness and locality transpired differently in international settings as compared to the United States. Consequently, further research is necessary to evaluate such historical issues in other geographic and social settings. For all of these reasons, the challenge for researchers remains to identify the phenomenology and rituals implicit in particular forms of media engagement, then assess the performative rhetorics that govern those acts. Contemporary media rituals, for example, reflect comparatively little calendrical structure but still invoke visual and auditory rhetorics. To gain such insights, researchers will require an increasingly nuanced view of media aesthetics in light of evolving media technology. All insights will continue to highlight the ways in which memory is filtered through the prism of culture and how media technology shapes this process. In today’s hyper-mediated postmodern environment, such factors remain ubiquitous, but notoriously fluid. Researchers will need to find many more pieces of this puzzle to decipher its picture.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported in part by a grant from the University of Kentucky College of Communication and Information Research and Creative Activities Program.

ORCID iD

Phillip J. Hutchison

Author Biography

Phillip J. Hutchison: is an Associate Professor in the Department of Integrated Strategic Communication at the University of Kentucky. He received his Ph.D. in communication from The University of Utah. His research emphasizes cultural approaches to media history, and his work has been published in scholarly journals including American Journalism, the Historical Journal of Film Radio and Television, the Journal of Popular Culture, and the Journal of Popular Film and Television. His research has addresses the social impact of early local television; journalistic coverage of historic weather and environmental disasters; and the relationship among race, sports, and journalism.

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