Growing up in Massachusetts in the 1950s and early 1960s, my schoolmates and I used to watch a children’s television show called Big Brother. At noon every day we were allowed to go home for lunch since many of us lived close to our elementary school, and at a quarter past noon, we would gather in front of the television and watch “Big Brother,” a man who was middle-aged, balding, pudgy, and bespectacled. He sat in a rocking chair in front of a fireplace, surrounded by a dozen kids, ranging in age perhaps from five to ten, whom he dubbed “small fry.” He opened every show by singing The Grass is Always Greener (in the Other Fellow’s Yard), accompanying himself on the ukelele.
Even when I was a small fry myself, I thought Emery made an odd kiddie show host. He seemed more like a great uncle or even a grandfather than an older brother. Yet something about him made us feel that he was talking to us rather than talking down to us.
Big Brother Bob Emery had been hosting children’s programs since 1921 when he broke into radio at age twenty-four, starting in his native Massachusetts and later moving to New York. In New York, besides working in radio, he hosted The Small Fry Club for the short-lived DuMont Television Network. It was a six-day-day-a-week children’s show that was very similar to the one he would host when he moved back to Boston in1952. By that time, thanks to George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, “Big Brother” had taken on sinister connotations, but “Big Brother” had long since become one of Emery’s trademarks, along with that penchant for referring to children as “small fry.”
The Grass is Always Greener, the song that opened each episode, was a 1924 hit that Emery had clearly chosen for its expression of contentment with what we have as opposed to being envious of others. He also regularly promoted the Jimmy Fund, a local charity for cancer research and treatment. He encouraged children to donate their small change, promoting generosity along with the sense of gratitude and humility invoked by the theme song.
Emery barely ever moved from his chair, making the show static by today’s standards, but in the early 1950s we were enthralled just to be watching anything on television. Then, too, he showed cartoons, which in the 1950s, usually meant cartoons that had once been shown in movie theaters since there was not the vast archive of old television programs that we have today.
The program aired Monday through Friday from a quarter past noon to one o’clock. This timeslot worked well enough for kindergarteners who attended morning sessions and had their afternoons free, but it meant that older children had to stop watching Big Brother in the middle of the program and get back to class before the bell rang.
One day, I was in my first-grade class in the early afternoon when a teacher dragged a boy from the second grade into our classroom. Our teacher and this other teacher essentially perp-walked him in front of us and demanded to know why he was late coming back from lunch.
“I wanted to watch the end of Big Brother,” he admitted tearfully.
Far from enjoying the schadenfreude of this moment, I cringed at seeing his humiliation. I was disillusioned to realize that an older boy could be so easily broken. I had thought that second graders were made of stiffer stuff. It seemed as if the dark side of the grass always being greener was played out in this drama. If I had had the vocabulary for it, I might have thought, “There but for the grace of God go I.” I, too, would have preferred to stay home and watch the rest of Big Brother rather than come back to school.
