Kid Heaven — Saturday Mornings

You know what I really miss? Saturday mornings as a kid. Other than Christmas, there was nothing to compare to the magic of Saturday morning. There was no school and you didn't have to get up at any particular time, but there you were, wide awake at 6a.m. and ready to face the day.

It's funny how, all week long, you crawled out of bed against your will, ate breakfast and, still sleepy, made your way to school. Saturday mornings were a different animal all the way around. Nobody had to tell us that it was time to get up.

I don't know about you, but I was usually up before the T.V. stations were even on the air. You see, boys and girls, T.V. was not a 24 hour entertainment source back then and most T.V. stations signed off at midnight and back on around 5 a.m. the next morning. When these stations were not broadcasting, they would often show a test pattern that looked just like this:

The test pattern was followed by The Farm Report and, more than just a few times, I sat through the farm report because i knew that cartoons were not far behind. While a guy by the name of Charlie Schmucker was doing hog futures, I would make my way to the kitchen and make breakfast. Now, making breakfast consisted of grabbing a box of cereal and eating right out of the box.

So, garbed in my PJs and equipped with my box of Cheerios or Frosted Flakes, I would take place in my TV chair and prepare for hours of classic kid entertainment. Thus equipped, I was ready for such great kids shows as Mighty Mouse, Shari Lewis, Howdy Doody and my very favorite, Fury.

I loved Fury because it featured a boy about my age who had a beautiful wild stallion named Fury. Trust me, there wasn't a kid alive during those halcyon years that didn't want a horse. Westerns were all the rage in prime time and you weren't a real kid unless you had a complete Roy Rogers or Davy Crockett cap gun. We were all cowboys back then.

Here's the thing about Saturday mornings back then; it was a kids world and everything on T.V. was geared to us. Unlike the rest of the week, there was nothing on T.V. that would even vaguely interest an adult. Kids owned the airwaves, but there was more to Saturday morning than just cartoons.

There was a feel to Saturday mornings. It was a bit like Christmas only on a smaller scale. The school week was two whole days away. Nobody expected you to do schoolwork on Saturday mornings. It was like, for a few hours every Saturday, the world was turned over to kids.

Just the other day, I was discussing the magic of Saturday morning with some very good friends of mine and we all agreed that Saturday mornings were great. the thing is, these friends of mine are roughly half my age and they had pretty much the same experience. Those friends of mine watched completely different shows, but the magic was the same for them as it was for me.

If only adults had something like Saturday morning to look forward to. I think we would all be better off for it. Maybe they should bring back Saturday morning cartoons for adults. Just imagine the harried business executive getting up at the crack of dawn and tuning in a six hour cartoon festival. I think it would good for us on several levels.

Now that we are all grown up, we have no such distraction. We have no such refuge from the world. Wouldn't it be nice to have just a few hours a week where all we had to think about was what kind of cereal we wanted to eat while we watched shows that were pretty much custom made for us?

I don't know about you, but I could use a Saturday morning like that again.