In the course of trying to come up with a theme for this week’s blog posting, I chanced upon a cartoon rendering I did back in my artist phase from the old “Mr. Peabody & Sherman” cartoon. This got me to thinking, and sure enough the childhood memories came flooding back in. The following essay is the result.                                                                                                                   Word Count: 889

A Low-Tech

Embarrassment of Riches

For a person like myself, who just happens to be obsessed with cartoons and the general story-telling aspects of most quality television & movies (I continue to be proud of the fact that I’ve never sat through a single Reality-Television program), this brings back all sorts of outrageous, wonderful, and lasting memories. What am I speaking of? Oddly enough, the fact that when I was growing up in Silverton we only had one choice when it came to a TV channel, KREX-TV, a CBS affiliate. Heck, from what the old timers tell me, we were lucky to even have that one single television channel in this little valley. Prior to when my dad was intimately involved in the first television-signal being picked up above town in 1960, they didn’t have any TV whatsoever. Makes for an interesting entertainment predicament actually, doesn’t it?

Back in the late 60s, throughout the 70s, and into the early part of the 1980s, if we wanted to entertain ourselves post-dinner in the evening, we basically had four options; 1. Watch what was on TV that night-followed of course by complaining or loving it, 2. Entertain ourselves in other ways-listening to records, arts-n-crafts, telling stories, etc., etc… 3. Having the occasional fight with my sisters (most siblings do this sort of thing even in today’s society, don’t they?), or 4. Building up a huge collection of comic books to stimulate the creative aspects of my mind (or regress into your childhood as the case may be).

Thinking back on my youth, thank God, we only had that single television station to entertain us. I like to think building up that comic book collection during my teens, has done more for my writing career in terms of creativity than just about anything else. It’s certainly given me a deep love of reading, and that’s held me in good stead ever since.

One aspect of having that single TV channel that I will never forget, is the annual summer family trips out to the left coast to visit my mom’s family. Besides introducing me and my sisters to various aspects of American Pop-culture that weren’t available to us growing up in a small Colorado mountain town, TV in Oakland, California was like haphazardly stumbling upon the treasure of Sierra Madre. The first time I experienced this multiple channel phenomenon I was convinced I’d died and gone to Entertainment-Heaven. Here we have a place where six (6-count’em) television stations exist simultaneously. Truly amazing to the mind of a seven-year old mountain boy.

My biggest memory? That’s easy-the first Friday rolled around while we were there one year, and I found myself in the downstairs part of my grandmother’s house watching television off a 6” Black-n-White with a picture that wasn’t exactly crystal clear in its imagery. Suddenly 7:00 pm rolled around and I found myself attempting to watch three shows at the same time-“Tarzan the Ape-Man”, “Time Tunnel”, and a favorite from back home in Colorado-“Wild, Wild, West”.

What to do in when faced with this conundrum? Since handheld remote controls hadn’t been invented yet-Maybe they had, but I didn’t have one? My solution, I sat a foot and a half away from the screen and tried to watch all three shows at once by switching back and forth to each show for five or ten minutes at a time. I lucked out as I think I’d already seen the episode of “Wild, Wild, West”, and since that was the case, I decided to concentrate on the other two shows and switched back and forth every chance I got. Believe it or not, I assume I got the gist of both shows even though I never watched either one of them for more than five minutes at any one time. Amazing what the human mind can pull off in dire situations such as this, isn’t it?

Then there was the multitude of cartoons we didn’t get back in Colorado-“Speed Racer”, Rocky-n-Bullwinkle”, a cartoon version of “The Beatles” “Gumby”. The list goes on and on, and my sisters and I tried to cram as much TV viewing in as we could during our all-too-brief stay in the Bay Area.

Looking back on the experience, I’m actually glad we didn’t have too many television viewing options while growing up. The memories when we did go to Cali. were that much sweeter. In my case, it also made for a more fertile mind.

Ironically these days, I refuse to even have the cable-TV hooked up at my place. Owing partially to the fact that I’ve grown to despise television commercials. Streaming services off the Internet on your computer, Library DVDs, watching YouTube videos, and various other things have made it all too easy to just “cut the cord” as they say.

Things might change with this cable-TV hook-up thing since the Summer Olympics are on the horizon. Will I watch a bunch of other stuff-probably.