Me and the CBS Eye

I love television history.  It probably began in utero.  My parents named me after a '50s television character named Susan Camille McNamara, played by the fabulous Ann Sothern.  Anyhow, whenever I happen upon a bit of TV trivia that dates back to the late 1940s or up into the early 1960s, it practically makes me shiver with delight.  One of my proudest possessions is a 1948 Emerson console TV.  It doesn't play - and might catch fire if it were ever plugged in - but it makes me feel good to see it in the corner of my den.

A couple of days ago, the CBS Eye had its 60th birthday.  In honor of the occasion, I found a picture of the old Eye with clouds in the background and put it on my computer.  I also found a picture of Ann Sothern, printed it out at home, and posted it in my cubicle for everyone to see.  I figured the lady for whom I was named, whose show was on CBS after all, deserved equal time.

When I was three or four, the Eye and I had a rocky relationship.

As a little girl, I was afraid of a lot of things, and The Eye was one of them.  One of the logos CBS used was an animated eye, whose iris opened and closed like a camera shutter:

To my chubby little four-year-old self, it looked leathery and malevolent, and invariably I would run screaming from the room.  When you stop to consider that most of the shows I watched were on CBS, it made for a lot of exercise of both the physical and vocal varieties. 

Thankfully, I grew out of it.  Nowadays I have a lot of affection for the Eye.  It's a reminder of pre-cable times, when we had four channels if we were lucky and the truly well-off had an antenna on the roof that could pick up stations 50 miles away. Yes, I sound like my grandparents talking about the good old days of radio, but who cares?

Just for the fun of it, NBC's earliest logo:

Sigh...think I'm heading over to YouTube.