Issue #7

Runaway toddler finds treasure

An obituary in the New York Times caught my eye the other day. The dead woman’s name was familiar but not for the reason the headline gave: “Marie Winn, Who Wrote of a Famous Central Park Hawk, Dies at 88.” I knew Winn from something else. She was important to me, I was sure of it, but how? Scrolling down her obituary, there near the end, I found it.

It was 1990 and I was seven months pregnant with baby number two when my 1 ½ year old ran loose in the library. I chased after her, out of the children’s section and up and down the nonfiction aisles, my waddle not as fast as her sprint. By the time I got hold of her, she had left a trail of books tossed on the floor. Little Rosemary might not have had so much fun if she knew one of those books would seal her fate and the fate of her yet-to-be-born siblings for years to come: The Plug In Drug by Marie Winn.

I took it home and read it cover-to-cover in an afternoon. The premise of the book was that what you are watching on television doesn’t matter—educational programs or junk entertainment, it’s all the same and results in the same passivity. Watching television means you aren’t living your life. Kids need real experiences, and in Winn’s view, television watching, Sesame Street included, was destroying childhood.

Days later when my husband returned from a business trip, he found the TV draped in a black robe and the remote hidden. Taped to the robe was a list of activities we could do instead of watching television. Poor guy—after two hard weeks in China he just wanted to chill with a few shows, only to be told to ride a bike and learn to play the guitar.

Maybe that gives you an idea of the insufferable zealot I became.

When visiting relatives, I would whisk Rosemary out of any room that had a television turned on with all the urgency of a mother saving a child from an aggressive dog. I paid $20 a year to subscribe to a newsletter called “White Dot,” which told people who already didn’t watch TV why they were much better without it. Maybe my kids were learning their ABCs and math facts a little slower than their classmates, but by golly they were outside all the time!

Sometime around the third baby I realized I had turned TV into a forbidden fruit, so I relaxed my rules. TV was allowed on Friday nights and Saturday mornings, which conveniently allowed my husband and me to sleep in on the weekend. I myself remained an ardent abstainer and kept away from TV for another ten years. (How I re-introduced television to my life is a story for another time.)

A few years ago I came across Winn’s book again, this time in a blog called Awful Library Books. The two librarians who wrote the blog would feature outdated, offensive, and just plain goofy books that needed to be culled from the shelves of public libraries across the country: books like My Mother’s Boyfriend and Me; Slavery Defended; and Acting Out the Gospels with Mimes, Puppets and Clowns. It was good for a laugh or an eyeroll—until they 86ed The Plug-In Drug. It was like they insulted my mother. I wrote in to object, and they posted my comment. The Plug-In Drug was not an Awful Library Book, I said, and in fact had changed my life. The bloggers doubled down on how out-of-touch the book was and said it had not been checked out in years. It was useless, in their opinion.

I didn’t write back to argue my point. I felt embarrassed for caring so much about a book other people deemed dumb and outdated. Maybe in my crusade against television I was as silly a figure as Eliot’s Prufrock:

Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;

At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—

Almost, at times, the Fool.

Reading Winn’s obituary, I’m thinking about that again. I may have fought the good fight, finished the race and kept the faith, but now I own a television set the size of a gorilla cage. After all my vigilance as a mother, after all the monitoring, lecturing and re-directing, these days my adult children spend as much time with screens as anyone else. Meanwhile, their peers who grew up watching lots of television are plenty creative, self-entertaining and empathetic. So was it all for nothing?

My kids say, no, they’re grateful they grew up without television. Although they didn’t love the rule as children and snuck in TV-time whenever they could, they’re glad they spent their days outdoors and in imaginative play and reading books.

I’m not here to advocate for a screen-free childhood. Young parents have enough people telling them what to do, and as I pointed out two paragraphs ago, there’s scores of wonderful folks who grew up with television habits that would have made the younger me fear for their future.

In the end, I just want to thank Marie Winn. Her book may not have Made All the Difference, but it did shape our family. It’s become part of our family lore, one of the many ways the kids make fun of me, the crazy mother who checked the temperature of the TV to see if it had been turned on in her absence; but also of the kids’ sense that I wanted something more for them and to get it I had to make mothering harder for myself; and that being different from their friends was not the end of the world, was something they could tolerate and even thrive from. Over time Marie Winn’s passion became part of our life, indelible, as deeply etched in our story as markings on a rock that spell, We went this way—

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What Winn watched

The red-tailed hawk of Central Park mentioned in Winn’s obituary had a fame of its own. The story of Pale Male, as she named the bird, is a charming one featuring the likes of Mary Tyler Moore, poisoned rats, and luxury New York real estate. Winn wrote a book about Pale Male called Red-Tails in Love: A Wildlife Drama in Central Park.

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Screen time, going up

I went down a rabbit hole with Winn and here’s a few discoveries:

· Winn was born Marie Wienerov in 1936 in Prague and emigrated with her family to the United States in 1939 to escape Hitler. Her sister was the much more famous writer Janet Malcolm, pioneer of long-form journalism who sparked controversy with some of her reporting.

· As a 21-year-old Columbia University student, Marie Winn was involved in a scandal on Dotto, a CBS quiz show. It was the first in a domino of 1950’s quiz show scandals. Reigning champion Winn was caught by a fellow contestant with quiz answers the show’s producers had given her. She had to testify before a Grand Jury, but other than that, she never spoke about it. I wonder if this experience—being branded a cheater as a young girl in such a public fashion—was the beginning of her lifelong antipathy towards television.

· Goodreads describes Winn’s husband Allan Miller as classical music documentary filmmaker and palindromist. Palindromist is an unusual appellation and probably used in jest, but the term did lead me to Miller’s children’s book Mad Amadeus Sued a Madam. I love palindromes, so I kept following that thread and came across this description of the Winn family from a 1996 New York Times article about her son Michael, who at age 15 was teaching a class at New School in puzzle-making:

“My father will disappear into his room with a Beethoven score,’ Michael said, “and we've been reasonably quiet, and he comes out with DRAT SADAT A DASTARD. My mother will be listening to Rudolf Serkin and write on the program a palindrome of something she's read there. We'll sit down at table and say ‘STAR WARS, ah STAR WARS RAW RATS.”

A dreamy English major’s dream of a family!

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Screen time, going down

One of my New Year’s resolutions is to not look at my phone while I’m waiting in line. It doesn’t sound like much of a challenge, but I’m a fan of baby steps. Anyway, I’m getting more eavesdropping time.

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Proud Auntie has something to tell you:

My nephews and niece have a band, and they’ve just released a new song, “Keeper of Time.” I think it’s terrific. Give it a listen! “Available on all platforms,” they tell me, if that means something to you. (My link is for Spotify.)