Counting to 40 - Part I

I will be 40 years old in February. I am just sitting here thinking about the differences that my son will have that I did not enjoy but have seen come to fruition in my lifetime. I know this is nothing new and generation after generation have the same speech but now I do see the wonder of it as technology and societal mores change and advance. I want to catalog this so when I give my son the "In my day" speech I'll have footnotes to review since I don't have the sharpest of memories right now and don't see that as reversing any time soon.


The first thing I will mention is television, or I should say: Television. I capitalize it because Television is such a mainstay in my life.

As a youth it was television, a large wooden piece of furniture housing smaller tubes and little electronic components surrounding a large picture tube. You would have to walk to it to turn it on, waiting the few minutes it took for the CRT to warm up. Our family was on the low end of middle class so we had a black and white set instead of the nice color sets. When the picture would start to lose its horizontal or vertical hold a slap or kick on the side of the set would fix it.

Once it warmed up we had a smorgasbord of options to view, within the 3 major networks, 3 smaller local networks and 3 public television networks along the VHF and UHF airwave spectrums we had availble to us. Television began broadcasting between 5:00 and 6:00 in the morning and stopped at 3:00 or 4:00, and those were the major stations, the smaller ones began later and ended earlier.

That was broadcast television in the 60's and 70's. There was no cable television, with Manhattan being the sole exception. All sports events were aired on regular broadcast television. The only major cable station was HBO which was captured with an antenna, hundreds of antennas sprewn about the outer boroughs aimed towards the Empire State Building. Our first color television was a small 9 inch television which sat on top of the big black and white set.

Friday and Saturday nights was for Creature Features. Saturday mornings was the day for cartoons. All morning long, cartoons. Sunday mornings was for the Bowery Boys (East Side Kids) and Abbot and Costello. On Thanksgiving day, cartoons would air as well. Christmas was the season for Rankin-Bass, the company that seemed to only work with claymation. Also on Christmas was the venerable March of the Wooden Soldiers: Laurel and Hardy, and It's a Wonderful Life. All day long on any station that you would turn to you would find It's a Wonderful Life.

Television is a bigger thing now, a media Juggernaut that sweeps along at 500 channels. A multimedia conglomerate that pushes itself along lobbying for regulation and then lobbying for deregulation and then lobbying for regulation again in 12 year cycles, each time saying it is for the consumers benefit. In all these years the only people I've seen benefit are the television and cable stations. The consumers always end up paying more and more. It's always the consumers that foot the bill for television's expansion, both in the form of monthly fees and taxes. That's why I now call it Television with a capital T.