But most of all, for kids born under the bomb and black-and-white TV, the revolution that was the 1960s began with Zacherley.
— David Colton, preface to Goodnight, Whatever You Are.
We take a lot of things for granted. I don't mean all those little inconsequential things that we siphon from our daily wake through the great white waters of life, but the really important things like our relationships with people, the places we go, and the history we take part in. Living our lives takes so much effort, so much involvement, that we scarcely get a chance to look back and reflect before it's all, suddenly, too late.
Richard Scrivani did look back, and his reflections on those things he didn't take for granted back in the 1950s and 1960s are the stuff of history, and childhood culture, and all those really important things many of us, who grew up in those churning and yearning years, have tucked deeply, and absent-mindedly, into our back soul-pockets.
Now I know it would be narrow-minded of me to say that the '50s and '60s were a wonderful time for everyone who grew up then, but I can say with certainty that there was one wonderful part of it that anyone could share in, whatever you were: Zacherley. In Richard's book, Goodnight, Whatever You Are! My Journey with Zacherley, the Cool Ghoul, he reminds us of a time when monsters ruled the nascent airwaves, and Zacherley reigned as the TV horror host with the most, and flaunted it to the horror of many parents and authoritarians.
Zacherley came on the scene when Screen Gems opened the cinematic vaults in 1957 to release the Shock! Theater and Son of Shock! films, unleashing many classic — and many spastic — horror and suspense movies onto the little screen, awakening the monster-lust in many a young fan with their arcane terrors. In the middle '50s, the first lady of terror, Vampira, helped open the crypt door to future horror hosts who put their bite on the jocular vein, in welcome contrast to their show's more traditional, or just plain godawful, fright offerings.
As TV stations around the country scrambled to market their Shock! package of films, Philadelphia's WCAU-TV came up with a creepy character named Roland to play host for their show. John Zacherle, already acting in a western aired by the station, was asked to play the surly, acerbic-witted, but humorous crypt-kicker.
Article comments