A Reader and Viewer With the Long View

Mrs. Kramer and me.

Everyone who writes for a newspaper has readers who regularly call or correspond. Some of the shrewdest observations about TV that I encounter come from B.G. (his initials), who for years has been leaving messages on my voicemail at the office. We’ve never spoken, and never will unless he leaves his number so that I can call him back.

And then there’s Mrs. Kramer. She’s plenty smart, and eloquent about TV, too.

For quite a while now, she’s been giving me phone sense, her lifelong North Carolina accent a giveaway that my friend from Silver Lake is on the line with something to say.

“I watched all the impeachment stuff,” she said during our most recent chat. “Even though I’m bitterly disappointed in Clinton, your sex life is your own private business. I thought they were all a bunch of stinkers that were out to get Clinton without any moral reasons. They wanted to kill him politically.”

Using excellent judgment, she rejected much of Barbara Walters’ two-hour book promotion with Monica Lewinsky on ABC. “I turned it on and was all set to watch the damned thing,” she said. “But I don’t think I watched more than 10 minutes. I was overcome by total revulsion. I turned it off and went to bed and read a book. I remember thinking, ‘Poor Howard. He’s got to listen to this.’ ”

As always, her perception was flawless.

Our relationship began a couple of years ago when Mrs. Kramer wrote to praise me for my grammar in a column. That was shocking. It was not the first time my grammar had prompted a reader response, only the first time the comment was positive.

I knew then that Mrs. Kramer and I had a future together.

She was highly articulate, opinionated and humorous. Only later would I hear the lusty laugh that accompanied her wit. Something else about her letter caught my eye, though. It was her age.

Mrs. Kramer wrote: “I’m 89.”

Get outta here.

In three months, she will be 91.

Mrs. Kramer never rode in a covered wagon. March being Women’s History Month, however, she’s about to be honored by Los Angeles officialdom as one of 15 “Pioneer Women” who have made “outstanding contributions to the strength and vitality” of the city. “Don’t put that in,” she said.

“I have to,” I said.

“I assure you I don’t deserve it,” she said.

“She does deserve it,” said Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg, who nominated her. “She’s a person who believes in lifelong learning and has lived a life that has been involved socially and politically with her neighborhood.”

Her two daughters and three grandchildren must be proud.

No publicity hound, Mrs. Kramer insisted that I use only her first or last name. I opted for the last, because that’s how I address her on the phone, where we speak regularly about life--she defines herself as a “news and political junkie”--and about television. “When I get up in the morning, I turn on CNN, and it’s usually the last thing I turn off at the end of the day,” she said. “When I do that, I’m looking for breaking news.”

“So you’re watching CNN now?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “I’m watching C-SPAN2. They’re taking a vote. The Senate is considering exempting the states from some federal regulations. It has to do with education.”

*

Mrs. Kramer is no stranger to either the federal government or education. Her late husband, Charles, held various jobs in the F.D.R. administration during the 1930s and 1940s. And Mrs. Kramer, besides being a former union activist and advocate, spent a dozen years working for the Los Angeles County Board of Education. She was an administrative secretary to the board’s clerk when she retired in 1973 from full-time employment, continuing to work part time another 10 years.

She’s an avid reader who never misses programs about books on the C-SPAN channels. Moreover, she writes poetry, and until recently attended summer poetry workshops at the University of Iowa. Yet amazingly, this woman of words came of age in an Asheville, N.C., home where there were no books. “My mother thought reading would injure my brain,” she said. “So I don’t know how you explain me.”

She attended a small girls’ college near home, and later the University of California, but for years was too busy being in sync with her husband’s career to earn a bachelor’s degree. She didn’t get one until much later.

At age 69.

Quite a story.

Yet there are no Mrs. Kramers on TV.

Instead, you get mostly the stuff of sadness or comedy--age erosion, dementia and stereotypes--when you get anything at all about the elderly. In an era when Americans are not only living longer, but living into old age more productively than ever, this segment of the population is largely invisible on TV, an industry increasingly shaped by those with no knowledge of Earth prior to TV. You’re more apt to see a Venusian than a Mrs. Kramer in prime time.

“There are a lot of us who still have our marbles,” Mrs. Kramer said. “But I don’t think there’s a program on the air that depicts an older person being full of life and interests and having knowledge and dignity. Don’t you know that nobody gives a damn about older people? We’re not in the buying age.”

“You mean the 18-to-34 or 18-to-49 demographic groups that advertisers and TV court?” I asked.

“That’s right,” Mrs. Kramer said. “All they care about is selling their commercials.”

So, naturally, she doesn’t care about them.

Instead, she watches the two C-SPAN channels. She watches CNN, never missing a series about antiques and that network’s legal series, “Burden of Proof.” She watches “anything that is classical music on KCET. An orchestra or singers. They also have a wonderful program for night owls called ‘Classic Arts.’ It’s all classical music and classical bits of stuff. One night I couldn’t sleep and wandered out and found it.”

And she watches Bravo, while bristling at its intrusive ads. “I grit my teeth at those damned commercials,” she said.

Mrs. Kramer was sounding like a TV elitist who resisted my best advice about the mainstream entertainment programs that much of America watches.

“Exactly!” she said, trampling my ego. “Unless you attack something that hits the basic bone of TV, I don’t care.”

Now deep into her fourth act, Mrs. Kramer said she expects to be on the scene another five years. The irony is that the evolution of society itself is much like some of the TV shows she disdains. “I’d like to live longer,” she said, “just to see how things turn out.”