My Childhood Television Set

The television I grew up with, on its four stubby legs, was about as tall as it was wide — it came up to my chest — and nearly as deep, if you count where the tapering end of the picture tube stuck out the back. It stood angled against the far corner of the “family room” opposite the couch and the bookshelf.

To turn it on I would pull a metal knob, reeded along the outer edge like a quarter. After resisting for a while, the knob would pop out toward me. Then, with a hum and a soft rattle of static pops, the television would awaken, and the hairs on my arm would rise toward the screen. Maybe this effect was why mom would sometimes tell us not to sit so near, fearing what the cathode rays might do to us at close range.

If I kept pulling the knob, it would come off entirely, revealing the stubby post that it was attached to. If I was feeling mischievous, I could push the post back into the set to turn it off, hide the knob, and then someone would have to hunt up the needle-nosed pliers if they wanted to watch TV. The knob attached to the post by sliding over it, as a hollow cylinder of metal with a more flexible band of metal inside to keep tension against the post. The metals were different sorts, so if I put the knob in my mouth (I was at a put-everything-in-your-mouth age), a strange sensation would run across my tongue where the metals swapped electrons through my saliva.

Behind the television, where the power cord and cable drooped, dust bunnies and legos collected. A handful of stubby plastic pegs stuck out near the top of a back panel of perforated particle board, next to a couple of bolts where you could attach rabbit ears if you weren’t fortunate enough to have cable like we did; you could twist these pegs to fine tune the set. Not understanding the theory, I took an experimental approach and learned I could make the colors go all wrong by cranking certain of the pegs in one direction or the other, or make the picture flutter like a curtain in the wind with another.

Inside the back panel was mystery stuff: vacuum tubes and solid state electronic doozywhatsits and dusty wires covered with woven insulation. Stuff I wasn’t supposed to touch. The picture tube itself gave up few of its secrets on being inspected from behind, but up front, if I looked at it very closely (when my mom wasn’t looking), it resolved into a honeycomb of tiny colored dots, which I found curious and suggestive.

Every once in a while one of the vacuum tubes would go bad. My dad would open the back panel, and, from a cloud of strangely-smelling singed dust, pull out the suspicious ones. We’d take these to the variety store across town where, one at a time, he would plug them into a free-standing console with multiple sockets labeled with the various tube variety codes. Some sort of indicator (a light? a gauge?) would indicate the health of the tube, and, having found the culprit, my dad would buy a replacement in a little dark blue thin cardboard box and we’d be back in business.

On top of the television was the weekly newspaper supplement that gave the programming schedule for the week. (Later on we’d have a VCR up on top, and, for a while, a pong console down among the dust bunnies.)

If it was early in the morning before anyone else was up, pickings were slim. There were thirteen channels on the set, accessible by turning a knob with the numbers 1 to 13 on it from click to click. But the first one, channel 1, was a sort of cruel joke — the Judas of the thirteen; it never had anything on, merely snow and a roar. And through the wee hours of the morning the remaining twelve were reduced to one as the others went off the air. That one lone channel featured a black-and-white camera on a pivot panning slowly back and forth across a series of analog dials showing time, temperature, wind speed and direction, barometric pressure, and things of that sort. It was not riveting, but until 6am or so, it was that or the snow on channel 1. Sometimes I chose the snow.

At six there was at least Davey & Goliath. If you’re not familiar with Davey & Goliath: it was a jerky claymation cartoon featuring a young boy and his dog who earnestly if sluggishly enacted the sorts of Sunday School lessons that stern Lutheran grownups thought would be morally nutritious for children. It was dreadful, but better than panning over dials, and usually better, depending on my mood, than electric snow. Like a lot of children’s television from that time, it was awkwardly, urgently, desperately trying to convince me that there was nothing wrong with negroes and that they were just like normal people and that there was absolutely no reason to suspect that they were menacing and criminal or ignorant and incompetent. In retrospect I can’t help but think there must have been a better way of going about this. I think their hearts were in the right place.

At six thirty the other channels would begin to come to life, including the cartoons: the good stuff. Bugs Bunny and the rest of the Warner Brothers crew were my favorites, but at some level it didn’t matter much as long as it was engaging — something other than those tedious shows grownups went for, like soap operas or Watergate. I was chasing a high. Sometimes, to amuse herself, mom would wait for a commercial break to begin and then ask us what show we were watching. We often wouldn’t remember. We weren’t watching the shows so much as we were getting stoned on them. The whirling lights and colors, the infinite jesters of wisecracks and sound effects, the pointless stories... all just peripheral, like the clatter of the roller coaster machinery under our feet, as we turned off our minds, relaxed, and floated downstream in blissful emptiness.