Manly Cap Pistols

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened around my 5th birthday, in July 1954. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

Of course, all silver linings line something non-silvery. In the case of television there was the mass marketing and associated mass influence. For my 5th birthday, just two months after we got a television, I had to have a cap pistol with holster and chaps, and a cowboy hat. Any parent who did not comply with those sorts of demands was to be subjected to verbal torture for 16 hours a day, said the TV.

"Every one else has one!" "How do you know? You live on a farm." "I know! I saw it on TV!"

It worked. I got the chaps, the cap pistol, and the cowboy hat. My parents soon discovered that it really was a scam to get them to buy caps for the rest of their lives. A roll would only last 30 minutes. Pretty soon they were buying them by the crate.

My Father encouraged it all because it was the only evidence he had seen that I was growing up heterosexual. This was decades before it became common knowledge that the Marlboro Man was gay, and long before Brokeback Mountain. In those days "everyone knew" that cowboys were real men.

If he had bothered to ask my Mother what else I watched during the day, he might not have been so worried. In addition to Gene Autry films, I also had to see Big Picture every week. Big Picture was a weekly show created by the US Army. It ran from 1953 to 1959. It showed film footage of US military battles from WWI onward. In one incredible episode they showed a captured film the Chinese made of themselves attacking South Koreans and Americans. It showed darkness at first, then dawn on a hill covered in brush. After a minute, suddenly, all the bushes stood up. Every bush was really a Chinese soldier carrying a rifle, and they advanced firing. It was probably the assault along Chongchon River, in November 1950. Anyway, if my Father had seen me watching all that raptly he would have been assured that I was male, because I was sucked in by guns, and would never have noticed that I was rooting for the Chinese.

He couldn't see anything that far from his expectations.