We were addicts. All of us. Hooked.
It didn’t seem so at first but it became obvious, as you will see.
In the 1960’s there were three TV stations: ABC, CBS, and NBC. There was no cable. There was no streaming. You had your favorite programs that came on every week at the same time and you organized your life around those programs. Already it sounds like someone who’s hooked, doesn’t it.
Our TV had a black and white picture. That was the only choice at the time it was purchased. Later color TV came out. I remember watching the commercials about these new color TV’s on our black and white set. It was ironic to watch a grand commercial about a color TV on a black and white set.
The TV sat in the “front room”. That was the room where there were chairs and a sofa. It was, for the most part, a comfortable room. In the winter when the mice came into the house I remember my dad sitting in a chair with a gun (I think it was a bb gun) and he’d shoot at the mice as they scurried along the base board. All this while we are trying to watch TV. I don’t think the great white hunter ever bagged his prey and he eventually gave up on the effort.
Our TV had glowing tubes in the back. There were lots of them. It was glowing maze. When the TV stopped working my dad would pull some of those tubes out and take them into town to the hardware store. They had a machine and he would stick these tubes into the slots that matched the prongs on the tubes and it would test if they were good or not. Replacement tubes could be purchased and hopefully you could repair your own TV in this way.
One day the TV broke. The tester at the hardware store didn’t find any bad tubes. The TV didn’t work. It wasn’t fixable.
This is when we found out we were addicted to TV.
It was bad. Nothing to do. And it was really bad when Gunsmoke, or Lucy or whatever your favorite show was on and you knew it and couldn’t watch.
We lived miles from other people. So we couldn’t walk across the street and beg the neighbors for a TV fix. A hit.
That went on for a while and then we realized that we could listen to the TV. While that wasn’t great it was better than nothing. So we would sit in the front room and listen to TV.
Then someone noticed there were shadows on the picture tube. You could kinda, sorta, make out big things like people and cars. So we would sit and listen to TV and watch shadows.
We were addicts.
How do you think we are doing these days? I don’t know about you but I take my phone with me everywhere. It has my calendar. I search for “how to” thinks that I need to figure out. It does my email. I look at the weather a few times a day. I watch YouTube. It takes pictures. And… oh yeah… its a phone.
I’m still addicted, just to a different device.
©David L Arment