Friday, January 20, 2006

Television

I remember the first time I heard the word "television." I was about three years old and my Daddy took me on the front porch, sat me on his lap and told me we were getting a "television." I asked him what it was and he said it was a "radio with pictures." Of course, I knew what a radio was -- we had a big one in the living room and the grownups used to listen to it a lot.

The next day, the television arrived. It was a big wooden box that sat on the table and it had a tiny screen (7" I think). There mostly wasn't anything to watch on it but people wrestling, but that was the way TV was in those days. For some reason, wrestling was a big deal and compelling enough to televise. My parents, a few months later, went to the top of some mountain in Georgia to see television on a bigger screen and you guessed it, the program was wrestling.

We didn't have that TV with the small screen for very long. Daddy sold it and we got one with a bigger screen --- it might have been 13" and round. This was a console and it sat proudly in the corner of the living room. The programming was no longer just wrestling. For kids, there was Howdy Doody every afternoon and the locally produced Cousin Cliff, a magic show. In the evening there was the old Lucky Strike Hit Parade, I Love Lucy, Dragnet, Mr. and Mrs. North and more. And the years slipped by.

When I was in the elemetary school, we used to go to my parents' friends house, the Bankston's, to watch color TV. Mr. Bankson was in the television repair business, so it made sense for them to have the latest thing. It seems to me that the only two shows in color in those days were the Rose Bowl Parade and the Miss America Pageant.

November 1963, President Kennedy was assasinated and I sat transfixed to the television. I remember seeing Lee Harvey Oswald get shot. In one moment, I began to understand the power of the medium. It was black and white and grainy by comparison with today's TV, but it was REAL.

When I was a junior in high school, I wrote a paper for economics class about the future of television. It talked about the UHF frequencies as being the next frontier for television. Prior to that we only had channels two through 13, and most cities only had two or three channels, if that.

Gradually, television shifted from black and white to color and also took over the UHF channels I guess I was a senior in high school when we got our first color television set. That was really cool! In those days there were two kinds of families -- those with color TVs and those without.

But then I was off to college and television was not part of my life much for four years. TVs were not allowed in our dorm rooms. I do recall, however, getting a special exception to watch presidential election returns. A bunch of us pooled our money and rented a television for the evening. But for those four years, the rest of the world was watching the Vietnam War in living color.

Steve told me that in his engineering dorm at Manhattan College, they couldn't have TVs either. But they had a way of dealing with it. They each kept some of the parts and assembled a TV whenever they wanted to view one. I guess in a dorm full of eletrical engineers, TV parts wouldn't be out of the ordinary.

In graduate school, I lived in an apartment and was free to have a television set. I think it was probably black and white, as color was too expensive even in 1968. While in graduate school at Auburn University, I had to take a course in educational television. In this course, I had to write a paper on the future of educational television. I had the audacity to suggest that educational TV was going to have to stop being just people writing on chalkboards and talking. I got a D on the paper, as I obviously had insulted the professor (an old school educational television veteran). We were also asked to respond to a new show called Sesame Street -- would it be a big hit? We said "no." Boy, were we wrong!

When I got married in 1969, we had a Heath television. Steve assembled it from a kit. It was a really nice color TV, with a remote control even (it had a cord, but still). I loved that TV! I decided that it was important to show our young son, David, how to turn it OFF. I also let him look as his Daddy repaired the TV. That was probably the most important thing I could have done as a mother in determining his future. He realized that HE was in charge, not the TV.

That poor Heath TV fell out of the moving van when we moved to Maryland in 1976 and never worked right after that. We had a small black and white TV that I used and Steve didn't watch much TV. And the years went by. Sometime around 1980, I bought a small color television and we retired the old black and white one. Television wasn't all that important to us -- we were too busy living.

About 1990, we built a new addition to the house and we put in a book shelf with room for a 27" color TV. Over the years, we had accumulated some small black and white TVs, and, of course, still had the small color TV. So when we moved into our new house in 1992, we had a collection of small TVs strewn throughout the house.

September 11, 2001, I was at the office and got a call from a client who asked if we had a TV and if we did we should turn it on. The only TV at the office was a small VCR unit with a rabbit ears antenna (we used it for previewing VCRs from potential speakers). I will never forget the horror of those fuzzy images of the World Trade Center and Pentagon. It was the same sick feeling as when I saw Oswald get shot!

Today, we have a nice 27" color TV in the family room and smaller TVs in various rooms. Steve and I almost never watch the same thing on TV. We havn't broken down yet and gotten one of the new flat screen, digital TVs. The ones we have work just fine! Perhaps that is part of aging -- things like that just don't matter so much anymore. Yes, they are very cool and the image quality is amazing, and so is the sound. Maybe in time -- when this one breaks.

No comments: