This is 1969, and the purpose that's alleged for appealing to the author as a paternal source, as an authority, is, according to both Barthes and Foucault, to police the way texts are read.
According to author Billy Ingram, perhaps the world's leading Winky Dink authority, many children who didn't own the plastic sheets simply took crayons they had around the house and, on Winky Dink's cue, drew directly on the glass screens of their parents' expensive first-generation television sets.