Oct. 11, 1963. As usual on Fridays, after dinner my recently divorced sister Donna picked me up and took me to her house. I was having a rough time with my parents, and this was a chance to get away from each other for a while. On the way we stopped at the drugstore and I bought some comic books. Instead of leaving me to babysit my nephew while she went out with friends, this week -- for whatever reason -- Donna stayed home with me.

After my nephew was in bed, we turned on the wonderful color TV and began watching an evening of b+w shows.

First was 77 Sunset Strip (already in progress). This private-eye show had been wildly popular in the late 1950s. The character of "Kooky" was, for a time, a huge teen-idol whose popularity filtered down into even the primary schools. Kooky's comic book legacy was that Snapper Carr mimicked his hep/beatnik/jive slang. By 1963 the show's popularity waned, the entire cast except for Efram Zimbalist Jr. was let go, Jack Webb was brought in as executive producer, and the series took on a less light-hearted, more noir-ish tone. Viewers did not appreciate such a wholesale alteration, and it was canceled halfway through the season.

Donna, bless her heart, at the end of a long week of work fell asleep on the couch. I slid to the floor to get closer to the screen for my new-favorite TV show: Burke's Law. In retrospect, this was not a very good show, but it was stylish, and to this 14-year-old it seemed really sophisticated. Tonight's episode, "Who Killed Harris Crown?" was typical with celebrities Barbara Eden, Don Rickles, Joan Blondel, Juliet Prowse, Lola Albright, and Eve Gabor playing suspects. As usual, with few clues but a lot of suspect-interviews, Burke intuits who-dun-it.

Next came a station switch from ABC to CBS to watch my old-favorite, The Twilight Zone, followed by The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. The first two episodes of TZ this season had been pretty weak. "In Praise of Pip" was a dark, snooze-fest that was too mature for my tastes, and "Steel", a tale of rock-'em sock-em robots in the future year of 1974 just didn't have that spine-tingle I'd come to expect from the Twilight Zone. Tonight's episode was called "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet". Well, the title sounded promising; and it starred William Shatner, who I knew from the "Thriller" episode "The Hungry Glass" and a couple other vague shows.

No need to explain further -- this is one of the classic Twilight Zones.

So, cut to late in the episode: My sister is asleep on the couch behind me; I'm sitting Indian Native-American-style on the floor with a big bowl of now-forgotten potato chips, tensely leaning forward as Shatner reaches for the curtain covering the airplane window.

Donna opens her eyes just in time to see The Gremlin revealed, and SHRIEKS!!

Electricity shoots through me -- I scream and convulse, the potato chips go airborne!

My scream startles Donna and she screams again!

Her scream startles me and I scream again!

This could have continued well into Alfred Hitchcock, but my little nephew came running out of his bedroom crying because all the howling woke him.

Eventually, everything quieted down, everyone else was in bed, and I was left alone in the living room, soaking up the solitude. Apparently, whatever movie Ghoulardi was showing didn't appeal to me, because I turned off the TV, put some favorite records on the stereo, and started reading the comics I'd bought.

Again, DC's Superboy, Jimmy Olsen, Challengers of the Unknown, and Blackhawk couldn't compete with Marvel's Spider-Man, Tales of Suspense, and Strange Tales. After 50 years, I can still remember reading for the first time the stories where Spider-Man battles the robot in the halls of his high school, and Ironman tries to subdue The Angel, who'd turned evil. But to tell the truth, if it weren't for the on-sale dates, I couldn't tell you that I bought the DCs that night.

I loved these Friday nights. They are among my favorite memories.