While my book concerns the early years of television—largely covering the period 1949 until 1952—it also concerns family history: my late mother’s relationship to the era.
Though her first appearance on TV took place near the end of 1948—she sang, as a guest, on a show on CBS-TV (at the time, she had a singing role in a Broadway revue)—her career in television really began in 1949.
1949 was also the year my parents met one another. When they married, later that year—sixty years ago today—my mother was twenty-one, and my father was twenty-eight. My father is now 88; my mother passed away in 2001, at age 73.