| Dad Hembeck's Close Encounter With The VCR (originally posted December 2, 2003/Fred Sez) |
| My dad would've been 101 today. Of course, since he passed away several months before his birthday back in 1987, there's no cake currently in the fridge awaiting a tremendous amount of candles and the use of multiple matchbooks! But when I went in the other room to program the VCR a few minutes ago and "December 2" came up on the screen, it suddenly reminded me not only of the date's significance, but of a funny little story about my dad versus modern technology (and ME, too, for that matter!...) After my mom died in 1983, I kept a close eye on the old fella, at least, as best I could while living a three hours drive away. I visited fairly regularly--for several days at a time each month, or every six weeks, at least--and while we never had ourselves a particularly (how shall I phrase it?...) "chatty" relationship, I put my time in dutifully so as to provide him with some much needed companionship. But what to do with all those long hours with virtually nothing to do? Yup--television! Eventually, though, I tired of watching all these programs he favored--primarily cop shows and bad sit-coms--that I never would've given a second thought to if I were back home with a handful of cable channels and my trusty VCR available to me. Y'see, those were two things dad didn't believe in--well, cable was the thing he didn't believe in, VCRs he just plain didn't understand! Even when his beloved New York Mets started broadcasting a large percentage of their games on the local SportsChannel outlet, he'd have none of the unsavory idea of spending good money to watch mere TV! Better he should listen to the radio instead to follow the team. And as for those new-fangled taping machines!... Of course, Lynn and I had one. In fact, by the mid-eighties, we had TWO! The second one was a rather light and inexpensive unit, and I somehow got the bright idea to bring it down to Long Island with me on my next visit, along with some tapes I'd made. Naturally, these tapes would emanate from the very cable arena shunned by Dad Hembeck. Specifically, they were all compiled from broadcasts beamed out from CBN--the Christian Broadcasting Network!!... Now, before you get the idea that things have taken a surprisingly spiritual turn here, let me quickly explain. CBN--a network that I believe was originally founded by Pat Robertson as a vehicle for his "700 Club" series, and which, after numerous changes, survives today as the ABC Family Channel--filled the many hours not devoted to religious programming with a cavalcade of reruns of by then rarely seen shows from the fifties. There was "My Little Margie", "I Married Joan", "You Bet Your Like" (aka "Best of Groucho"), and, to my way of thinking, most wonderfully of all, "The Jack Benny Program"! Despite what I may've said about others around here in the past--Bob Hope and Soupy Sales come immediately to mind--Jack Benny has always been and and will always remain my very favorite comedian. When I happily discovered that the shows that helped define my nascent comedic sensibilities--and which I hadn't seen in nearly two decades--were being piped out over the airwaves via a religious station, it didn't matter one whit to this life-long late Sunday morning sleeper! Hey, for another treasured opportunity to see that lovable skinflint again, I would've eagerly tuned in to the Al Qaida Network, if my cable deal offered it!! So, of course, I proceeded to make several tapes for posterity, carefully exorcising the unwanted commercials as I sat there, blissfully entertained by Jack and his gang each and every night. Before long, I'd accumulated a half-dozen of these priceless compilations... (It should be noted for the record that I sampled pretty much all the ancient fare CBN had to offer--some of which, at this late date, has slipped my mind, mind you--but except for the Groucho material, most of it ranged from mediocre to simply dreadful, which was NOT the way I'd remembered it from my misbegotten childhood. (And here I'd been, long laboring under the notion that Gale Storm was a wrongly neglected Queen of Comedy!?! Oops....) As for the grand old Mr. Marx, although I once again enjoyed watching him needle and mock numerous contestants on his idiosyncratic quiz show, I just didn't feel the necessity to amass a stockpile of his repeats like I did the Benny show, which ran just before Fenniman and friend hit the air. Which as it turned out, was a decision that's at the very crux of my ever expanding anecdote...) Dad, y'see, loved Jack Benny, too, so, as a treat for him (and let's face it--to me too), I brought the VCR along and several of my custom-made tapes. Dad had no access to this material, and I thought he'd enjoy seeing it again. Well, turns out I was right. Who coulda predicted such a thing? But there was ONE little catch... I set up the machine as my father--born in the Germany of 1902, sailing over to this country in the late twenties--looked on with silent curiosity. I explained the concept of the VCR, how I'd made these tapes--each featuring six hours of edited, commercial free Jack Benny shows--and then proceeded to pop a tape in and sat back to enjoy the antics of Rochester, Dennis Day, Don Wilson, and the rest of Jack's comedy posse with my dad. We both laughed frequently, and all was going well, right up until the episode neared it's imminent conclusion... A gimmick they employed at CBN in those days was that toward the end of one show, a graphic along the bottom of the screen would come on--twenty years before all the Big Networks themselves thought of it--that would serve to promo the next program up on the schedule. A comet-like projectile would hurl itself across the lower portion of the TV with words trailing it that would say (in this particular case) "Best of Groucho--Next!!" as Jack was thanking his guest star du jour and saying goodnight to both the studio and viewing audiences. When dad first saw this, he became suddenly interested, rising up off the couch and pointing at the set. "Hey look, Freddy--Groucho is next!" "Uh, no dad. That's just an advertisement for what the CBN channel plays after Jack Benny, but since I only chose to tape the Benny shows, well, I'm afraid there's no Groucho shows on this tape, just more of Jack..." "Are you sure? After all, it says right there on the TV, Groucho is coming up next?..." This discussion went on throughout all the goodnights and as the credits rolled for the episode we had just seen, and try as I might I couldn't convince the old guy I was right and he was wrong. Partially, this had to do with the fact that I don't think he EVER gave my judgment much credence, so why start now? Secondly, like I intimated earlier, he was old school, REAL old school. He wasn't an ignorant man, but all this modern technology!?! Yeesh--it was a little much for him... Our silly argument persisted, each of us stubbornly holding on to our beliefs as to what was coming up next, with only one of us poised to be right (that'd be ME folks!..). Sure enough, another episode of Jack Benny followed, and dad had to admit it--I was right. As my 13 year-old daughter might say, "Well, DUH!..." We watched awhile longer, but somehow, the shows just didn't seem as funny anymore. We never did make it all the way through the tape, and though I offered to compile some Groucho episodes to view during my next visit, dad didn't appear all that enthused by the notion, so it never actually happened. It was back to "Kojak" and "The Streets of San Francisco" for us, though I usually had my nose stuck in a comic book while they droned on, never an activity of mine that dad thought all that much of, but hey, that's another story... This tale has always stayed with me, partially because of the humorous absurdity involved with insistently contradicting something so completely pre-determined as what's coming up next on a personally compiled video tape. Besides the cheap chuckles, though, it also demonstrates in some weird way what our relationship was like more often than not, sad to say... Geez, when I impetuously got the notion to sit down and share what I've always considered little more than a cute anecdote about a older gent and his difficulties grasping the finer points of the (then) modern world--I didn't mean to go all heavy on you! Like I said, geez!... A year ago today would've been his Centennial. I suppose it was just as well he was no longer around. I mean, could you just imagine THAT phone conversation?... "Hello, dad? Hey, happy 100th birthday!...Uh huh...Yeah, sure....Hope all is well...Me? Oh Lynn and I are getting ready to launch my web-site!...Web-site, dad...Computers...the Internet?...No, it has NOTHING to do with real nets, dad--OR spiders...." Oy. Better I just shut up and cut the cake!... |