From the Shelves with Kevin Paquet

We live in a technological El Dorado. An average JSC student probably owns a color television set, a landline telephone, a computer whose equivalent twenty years ago would have filled a large room, a cell phone the size of a deck of playing cards, two or three radios, and home video device capable of playing DVDs (and, for the nostalgic, videotapes). It is rather curious, then, that the origins of technology are not delved into deeper, or by more. I have found, in my many sojourns to the fine thrift shops of northern Vermont, that the most interesting machines are the ones that work most of the time. Technology becomes intolerable if it never works, and dull if it always works. As such, I have likewise found that the earliest periods in technology – the times when men were men, women were women, and radios were made of wood and Bakelite – are also the most fascinating. And it is arguable that the most interesting story of all is that of the DuMont Television Network. It is a story at turns both comic and tragic, because it tells the story of the men who built an enterprise on dreams and were cut down by the very rules and engagements that were supposed to help them succeed.

Since the origins of TV aren’t taught in grade school, it is quite probable that most people just grew up with the idea that ABC, CBS and NBC simply emerged from the mist one day, and cable followed sometime later. In fact, they were not alone – nor, for that matter, were they the first. In the earliest, sketchiest days of television – when it was done live and had more in common with theatre than film – there was another. “The Forgotten Network” tells the tale of Allen B. Du Mont and the fading imprint he left on American culture.

Du Mont – whose name is spelled with a space not found in the network’s title – founded a company in the 1940s which made, not surprisingly, television sets. It was here that he came up with the idea of creating a television network, in order to give the buyers of his televisions something to watch. And so the DuMont Television Network was founded in the late 1940s, chartered by “Doc” Du Mont and a battalion of young hopefuls who had no idea what the hell they were doing.

The Big Three television networks existed at the time, but as empires of sound, not sight. Radio was still the master of the airwaves, and it in turn was dominated by CBS, NBC Red and NBC Blue. The latter two had been broken into two separate companies by the FCC in an anti-trust suit. NBC Red simply went back to being NBC, and it was NBC Blue that became ABC. Unfortunately, this well-intentioned action was the first of several ropes the FCC tied around DuMont’s neck. There were four networks – and only three television outlets allowed in any given market.

The DuMont Network wasn’t exactly putting out the finest material, either. The show’s almost surreally tight budget is most vividly explained in the chapter dedicated to “Captain Video and His Video Rangers,” a television program that arguably set the bar for lame. It was set in space, but since it was also done live, Captain Video would buy time for a scene change by tuning in to his agents on Earth. For no conceivable reason, these agents were people in old cowboy films.

In addition to the show’s technical limitations, the Captain was also at the mercy of creative control – led by a hack so awful the screenwriter was once paid to stay home – and the prop department. Captain Video (“Master of Time and Space! Guardian of the Safety of the World!”) had a fantastic weapon in the form of the “atomic rifle,” which was a toy gun attached to a car muffler. How fake did this gun look? This gun had a bend in it. This gun was limp.

“The Forgotten Network” is basically a catalog of the network’s more prominent shows – prominent being a relative term – and so the second two-thirds of the book are basically chapters of shows, collected by topic. Captain Video is given a chapter all to himself, as is Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, but most of the others are genre clusters. Of course, genres were still quite amorphous at the time, and it is hard to say whether or not the people of DuMont were worse off with their hits or their misses. Wherever DuMont succeeded, the other three networks – which actually had money and talent – would follow quickly. And where DuMont failed, DuMont was left alone. Curiously, the book contains no records of any true bombs in the DuMont catalogue, just a bunch of really mediocre shows, many of which were on the air for less than a year. DuMont had everything, including vaudeville, crime dramas, game shows, talk shows, variety shows – even a program called Your Television Babysitter, with which busy mothers were supposed to leave their children for half an hour while cleaning up the kitchen after breakfast. Really.

Many of the DuMont people were very young during their service in the network’s ranks. As a result, many of them were still alive when Weinstein wrote the book. And it is these interviews that turn what would have been a so-so archive of obscure trivia into a human story of fight and failure in the earliest days of television.
Weinstein talked with many people, and they paint a sort of mutual self-portrait. Doc Du Mont comes across as an odd but genuinely kind man who wanted the best for everyone and ended up losing the company because he understood values better than business. Olga Druce, who was brought in by General Foods when it started sponsoring “Captain Video,” assessed the situation of the show and “was ready to commit suicide.” And yet it was under her tenure that the show actually started trying to insert messages into its content. Of course, that didn’t stop the fun – Don Hastings, who played Captain Video’s sidekick, the Video Ranger, was also interviewed, and explained that the DuMont crew taught him to drink. Another man, this one a technician, remembers meeting Bishop Fulton J. Sheen for the first time. He is Jewish, and so his memory is also of the reaction of his Irish and Italian coworkers at meeting a Catholic superstar.
The book ends with a word on the network’s legacy – which, to be kind, is basically a half-truth, because the network doesn’t really have a legacy. DuMont went out of business the year before videotape was invented, and the (very, very small) number of surviving episodes from the network’s shows are on kinescopes. Kinescoping was a stopgap technology designed to provide copies of episodes to network affiliates not connected to the main studios by coax cable. The process was fairly simple: a film camera was pointed at a live TV set, and the film was mailed away. It is these films that comprise the network’s legacy, and Weinstein figures that there are only about two hundred in total. Only Fulton Sheen’s material still makes the rounds of the TV dial – his “Life is Worth Living” airs on EWTN.
Outside of the films, the remaining records of DuMont exist in the memories of these who saw the shows when the aired live, so many years ago. As sad as it is to say, the legacy of DuMont is all but lost, and there is no way to get it back. Perhaps the best we can do is fill in the blanks as best we can, and pay due respect to those who tried so hard to make television happen for us. So dig the black and white set out of the attic, tune the antenna to just a little off-signal, and sit back. The Captain is out there somewhere.