Oil painting of Rockefeller Center I did in early high school. Around 1970. Back then, I was playing a game with some friends where we were picking out blocks in our town of Pullman. We were drawing maps of those blocks and claiming them as our domains. My friend Jeff had about the best block in town. The central block of the Washington State University campus with gyms, pools, the union building and so forth. My block had some dorms, but not much else except farmland.
Thinking outside the box, I decided to look beyond the confines of Pullman and claim Rockefeller Center in New York. I figured, Rockefeller Center qualified as a "block" because it's blocks are all connected with an underground shopping concourse; so I thought at the time.
3 connected city blocks in New York City, like a planned unit development. The size and variety of this domain fascinated me.
It also housed the NBC studios; both radio and TV. Unlike most kids, I wasn't glued to TV, but radio was a different story. I lugged around a transistor radio that I got for my birthday during 6th grade. NBC radio was my weekend lifeline to Rockefeller Center. Monitor was the show; a weekend magazine of news, interviews and music. President Nixon, Martin Luther King, the Vietnam War and the Apollo program all came through my radio. They even had regular tips from a psychologist named Dr. Joyce Brothers.
After almost 40 years, the ads are even interesting. I've recently found a web site with podcasts that bring back many of those old memories. Monitor Beacon Net. It's archived quite a few things including many of the Monitor shows that ran during that show's tenure between 1955 and 1975.
Entertains me via MP3 player as I do my custodial shift.
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