TV guide
Rick "Fuzzy" Klein rewinds time with old Chicago television.
“Memory and me have always been a little weird,” Rick Klein admits somewhat sheepishly. “In some ways, I don’t have the best memory for things.” An ironic confession for a man who’s immersed in the past. For three years, Klein has run a website called the Museum of Classic Chicago Television (MCCT), an online archive (fuzzymemories.tv) of local TV, most from the late ’70s through the mid-’80s—his childhood. “That’s when TV was the most magical,” Klein says.
“Everything was magical.” Among the more than 2,900 clips he has posted are classic oddities such as Svengoolie; TV news segments from extinct stations; cartoons with full commercial breaks featuring spots for defunct restaurants such as the Ground Round; quick, colorful station-ID bumpers and sign-offs; and a fascinating section labeled “Technical Difficulty Moments, Screw-ups & Interruptions.”
The clips streaming on MCCT are just a fraction of the thousands of hours of off-air taped footage Klein has obsessively collected since the mid-’90s. One room of the Oswego home he and his wife share is filled with tapes: VHS, Betamax and obscure formats like Quasar’s “Great Time Machine.” He’s sourced them from basements, flea markets and garage sales, or hunted them down in the tri-state area via Craigslist pleas. Others were sent by fans of the site.
“Sure, I don’t have the best memory,” reiterates the 35-year-old, whose handle on the MCCT site is, appropriately, “Fuzzy.” “But maybe that’s fueled some of my hunger to find this stuff from the past. I know people that can recite the entire opening for Monster Rally Movie from the ’70s. It only comes back to me once I see the thing. It’s like the clip is a key that unlocks a dusty room to my memory and all the feelings I had at the time.”
Klein, an IT guy for a suburban junior college, grew up in middle-class Cicero. One of his earliest memories is of staying up late as a seven-year-old, flipping through TV channels with his older brother. “It was one or two in the morning,” he says. “On Channel 32, we saw this program called Night-Owl, this crudely computer-generated news and information service. It had, like, Atari 2600 graphics that they would play easy-listening music behind. I just remember being sort of mystified by it.” About 15 years later, Klein tracked down a Night-Owl tape. “I was overjoyed to see it,” he says. “I was seven again.”
The tape that first gave Klein the collecting bug was of the 1983 Bozo Show his family attended. A neighbor recorded it, but the video was eventually lost. “When I was in high school, I found it again,” he says. “I watched it, and it was like a trip, you know?”
Klein views his video collection, in part, as an accessible form of time travel—something that fascinated him at an early age. “Growing up, I was really into Doctor Who and all the different Twilight Zone episodes that dealt with time travel,” he says. “Watching taped off-air TV like this is one of the few ways that you can tap into that. Especially when it’s a complete broadcast, commercials and all, which is ideal—it gives you more of a sense of temporality: This is the exact thing that was on a TV at a certain time in history. You’re right there, you’re in the moment, you’re watching it as if you were there in 19-whatever.”
While he does enjoy a few current shows including The Simpsons and Curb Your Enthusiasm, Klein generally despises what he sees as the insincerity of today’s pop culture. “It’s like the snarky kids in the back of the class took over the whole world.”
Submit your old videos to the Museum of Classic Chicago Television, P.O. Box 482, Downers Grove, IL 60515.
