I am giving away my age of course but so what... I will turn 68 soon and I am good with it! Growing up in my row house neighborhood in Philadelphia somewhere around 1958 or perhaps 1959 we had only one neighbor with a color TV. There were only a few shows "In Color" as I recall and one of them was the WCAU Channel 10 evening NEWS with John Facenda. For football fans Facenda was the deep voice of NFL Films for decades. "The frooooozzzzennn tundra of Lambeauuuuu FIELD" and so forth. Anyhow us kids would gather on The Fussman's front porch and peer inside the window to get a glimpse of Mr. Facenda IN COLOR... ON TV! I assure you that none of us cared about the NEWS but the color television just blew our minds. SO it came to pass that The Wizard of Oz was to be broadcast IN LIVING COLOR and the Fussman family invited the neighborhood kids in to see it on their new RCA TV. Pizza was delivered (Yes long before Dominoes) and about 15 kids sat mesmerized before the TV watching Dorothy and her friends and when the movie turned from black and white to COLOR... it took our breath away.
I have watched this movie many times since then and every time Dorothy sees the colorful world of OZ for the first time my mind goes back to the Fussman living room and the impact it all had on an 11 year old street kid and his friends. Watching in LIVING COLOR... Somewhere Over the Rainbow!
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