Station Identification

This is a memoir by a thirty-one-year-old man who has just given up the most meaningful, heartwarming and enduring relationship in his life—his television set. The tale begins with Donald Bowie’s discovery of Howdy Doody, and ends as he bids farewell to television after the last episode of the Mary Tyler Moor Show. In the span of Donald’s young life, he trades reality for the better life on the tube. TV becomes Donald’s family, his friends, his classroom and, ultimately, his undoing. Station Identification is his hilarious confession of that beautiful friendship. Grappling with the urges of puberty, he finds that “the whole business of womanhood seemed easiest to understand when it was jammed into Elly May Clampett’s jeans.” Years later, after a wonderful night on the town, Donald brings his date home to watch TV—something close to having her meet the folks. “She fell asleep during a rerun of The Honeymooners,” he writes. “I knew the relationship wouldn’t last.” Time takes its toll on Donald Bowie and television. Hoping to recapture the ecstasy of Howdy Doody, he watches Sesame Street, “Something about the Sesame Street gang suggested that after the show they have white wine in stemware from Bloomingdale’s. Buffalo Bob always drank milk out of jelly glasses. He was one of us.” This becomes the beginning of the end. If television was once believed to be a vast wasteland, Donald Bowie has come back to tell us that it is a place where dreams are born.