We lived in Kansas in 1966.
We often watched TV together as a family and most of what we saw on television we watched on KTVH TV, a CBS station, or on KARD TV, the local NBC affiliate.
Wichita's ABC affiliate, KAKE TV, didn't have stellar color transmissions at the time, and when it did, their broadcasts looked a bit green on our RCA TV, AM/FM, Stereo Console.
On evenings in autumn and winter, my mother would assemble TV Trays in the living room. (It was the season for new TV shows, after all.) My father would light a fire in the fireplace.
On Sundays we would chow down on roast chicken, pot roast, or meatloaf with mashed potatoes and gravy while we watched Bonanza. Those Sunday nights were special. Dessert was always pie. After eating, my dad, would remind us, Sunday after Sunday, "The Cartwrights aren't the only family to have a fireplace."
He'd then turn off the gas jet and the fake logs would slowly go black.
One Wednesday evening in December of 1966 we abandoned our CBS and NBC loyalty to watch ABC Studio 67's inaugural broadcast of Truman Capote's A Christmas Memory.
For the first time, watching a television show, I thought that I might cry. I fought back tears for the entire hour. I identified with the character, Buddy, the little boy who tried so very hard to please everyone. For the broadcast, Truman Capote narrated the story that he wrote in the mid-1950s, the story that was first published in Mademoiselle magazine.
The Studio 67 broadcast is here in multiple parts. I hope you enjoy it and share it this holiday season. The film, starring Geraldine Page, is a treasure. {Note below the video links.]
The closing words of A Christmas Memory continue to haunt me:
But gradually in her letters, she tends to confuse me with her other friend, the Buddy who died in the 1880s; more and more thirteenths are not the only days she stays in bed: a morning arrives in November, a leafless birdless coming of winter morning, when she cannot rouse herself to exclaim: "Oh my, it's fruitcake weather!"
And when that happens, I know it. A message saying so merely confirms a piece of news some secret vein had already received, severing from me an irreplaceable part of myself, letting it loose like a kite on a broken string.
That is why, walking across a school campus on this particular December morning, I keep searching the sky. As if I expected to see, rather like hearts, a lost pair of kites hurrying towards heaven.
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