Fifty-two years ago, late in 1949, television happened in my parents’ household, in our nation, and in my life.  Before that, for the better part of a year, we had gone visiting to the home of a Cub-Scout friend to join his parents in a regular date to watch the Friday Night Fights.

Boxing was big on television in those days, as the radio-schooled proprietors of the new medium sought ready-made events to fill the hours of visual entertainment that American households and advertisers had started demanding, almost overnight.  Before that, blow-by-blow descriptions had come via radio, and I remember my father leaning attentively toward the speaker of our big console, in the late ’40s, to hear not just the running description of a fight, but the body blows, as well.  I remember him exclaiming, now and then, when he detected the landing of a punishing blow.

Boxing was big in our home.  During the depression, my father had become something of a local entrepreneur in our Western New York community, staging amateur boxing matches at the county fairgrounds, attracting a weekly crowd to watch young men, local and imported, slug it out.  My birth was even specially noted in the pages of the local paper: the sportswriter elicited an opinion from the delivering physician that at my birth weight, I was destined to be a middleweight.

That pleased my father.  He liked middleweights.  The middleweights, he was fond of saying, had the necessary bulk to hit really hard, but could still be light on their feet, using clever moves to dodge and avoid – bob and weave.  Footwork was a factor.

After a taste of televised boxing as a visitor, my father spent some of his welcome post-war income to acquire one of those RCA table-model TV sets in the brown plastic case.

That was 1949.  I was 11.  For me, it was a seminal event.  Seven years later, at 18, I would have my first job in television, at a time when a young man with a decent voice and rudimentary performing skills could do it all.  It would lead me into news, the appropriate degrees, and an extended career in broadcast journalism.

But in the early ’50s, boxing was the thing.  Dad would watch the fights, leaning almost as close to the ten-inch screen as he had to the radio speaker.  Round by round, he would score the combatants, later criticizing the referee and ringside judges if they failed to agree with him.

Boxing was ideal for television.  Three-minute rounds, with one-minute breaks that fit the commercials of the day.  (Remember the Gillette jingle?)  The family and guests watched together, Dad analyzing the action during commercials after reaching out to turn down the volume.  (Those were the days before remotes and mute buttons.)

That was when I first heard the name, Gene Hairston.  I recall that my father took very special note, for Hairston was deaf – a talented middleweight with a handicap that seemed to suggest and shape, rather than limit, his career options.  I don’t recall how many Hairston fights we saw, but I remember my father being impressed with the young boxer who was just eight years older than I.  He admired the man’s footwork, steel-hard fists, and heroic heart.  Although he warned me that I must never become a boxer – he had seen too many men take permanent damage – I know he wished, somewhere deep in his heart, that I would one day show the courage of a Eugene Hairston.

I could not know, in those days, that Hairston and I would one day be living on the same New York island, that I would sometimes even sit in an adjacent booth in Trellis, unaware until now of our connection across time and careers and families.

For me, then, this issue of The WIRE is a link, through a neighbor, to a time when America and I discovered the war-delayed technology of television – to a time when young men rose above the disadvantages of their lives by standing toe-to-toe and exchanging blows to head and body – and to a father long gone and greatly missed.

DL