I miss Harry Gasser and our Zenith

I was watching 24 Oras and something happened to me: I suddenly realized that I missed someone. I missed someone that I grew up with on television. I missed Harry Gasser.

During the early eighties we had successions of TVs that didn’t work well. I never knew where my father got those successions of large cabinet type vacuum tube TVs with missing channels, but I had an inkling. 

When I was four or five years old my father would always tag me along wherever he went. One day we went to his kumpare’s house. This kumpare of his was a TV repairman. My father saw this cabinet type Zenith just lying there under his kumpare’s house (silong) collecting dust. This was how my father operate: he would first start with small talks, then a little compliment, and then he would glimpse at the TV and then his kumpare would look at him looking at the TV then the small talk would continue while the glimpses continued,too. My father had this aura of something, I couldn't describe it that compels people to give in to him.. 

The kumpare made the first move, “pare sira nay an din a binalikan kung gusto mo sayo na”. ( I didn’t know maybe he paid for it. I’m young then, and I’m just recalling and spicing these stories.) And that’s how we got the Zenith with missing channels and the other TVs too, I think. Aside from those TVs with missing channels we also had refs that didn’t make ice, a water pump that always needs welding, electric fans that was more noise than air, electric iron with melting handles, an oven without any burner, a mercury spotlight that dies and resuscitates like Christmas lights, fluorescent lamps that hums like a hornets’ nest, …I didn’t know where my father got these things but…Ooh, I almost forgot to include the largest cigarette lighter that I’ve ever seen in my life, it was a road grader’s dynamo that you had to crank three to five times in order to produce a tiny spark that would in turn light a gasoline fueled lamp made out of an old cotton rag and an empty tiki-tiki bottle.

Our Zenith was the TV I grew up with. I recalled how my father would (always) open the back panel so that he could change channels, or how he or sometimes my kuya would climb up the roof to rotate the antenna so that it could get a better reception. Sometimes my father also moved the Zenith this way and that way. This was the ritual that he did day and night so that we could watch TV.

This was also the TV where I grew fond of Harry Gasser of RPN nine’s Newswatch, that is, aside from the fact that that channel was the only intelligible channel that the TV could receive. (ABS-CBN was still the Banahaw Broadcasting Corporation then, a Marcos station.) Harry’s news casting was straightforward. No hype and no embellishment. The voice was authoritative and well modulated, perfect enunciation, good lips movements and his poise relaxed and confident. This was the age where the newsmen do their news sitting down, executive like; not standing up, like stand up comedians.

My respect for Harry wavered when I found out that he was the husband of Flora Gasser. “You’ve got to be kidding me”, I told my ate when she told me that. But I realized later that love is not all about physical attraction. There’s something deeper, noble about it. 

I recalled Harry Gasser sneezing and how he got away with it. He simply said “excuse me” not the way this AM radio announcer who is better off inside a radio than on national TV do today “eeeeexcuuuuuuuuse meeeee pooooooo….” I mean…(I don’t want to violate his human rights.)

The way Harry carried himself, I couldn’t imagine Michael V or anyone parodying him.

RPN was my favorite channel then for aside from falling in love with Harry, I also fell in love with biology thanks to David Attenborough’s “Life on Earth” series. (I thought I’d be a biologist going to different places in search of new species…but…you know what happened, I became a spiritual explorer.) There was also Champoy, John en Marsha, Flordeluna, Johny Midnight, ..etc. There was also this guy who was a  cross between a Hasidic Rabbi, a zookeeper, a laxative and a shampoo model, a philosopher, a theologian and a mystic. He has this late night program called Space 2000 E.T. where he preached salvation through alien blah, blah, blah, blah…. He had a conclave somewhere in Banahaw and the guy is still alive! Of course it’s now 2006 and the E.T.s are still somewhere out there in space looking for him and the rest of his X-files gang.

When my dear mother got her wage from the small time neighborhood cooperative we call paluwagan, she immediately bought a plastic Nivico 12 inch television . That was the end of the beautifully crafted Zenith. I wished I’d save the cabinet of that TV, lots of memories in there.