In Memorium 2015: TV

I grew up on TV. TV was a focal point of my home. This will date me--but vain to deny it!--I grew up in a time when television was a member of the family! It was a piece of furniture as vital as a couch to any respectable living room. The very first TV I remember was a black & white and when you turned it on, you had to wait for it to "warm up" before the picture showed up on the glass screen. (Can I get a witness?) Around 1969, my dad bought us a new model and the ever present TV Repair man who came to replace faulty vacuum tubes like one would replace fuses on the old electrical boxes disappeared.

Whatever the model or innovation, the culture of television pervaded my home from my earliest memories in the mid 1960's to my departure for college in the fall of 1979. My father worked in a factory on the 3rd shift from 3 to midnight through most of my youth. Thus dinner was simply an event with my mom alone that involved TV-Trays! We ate our meals not at a table, but at little "tables" and the TV was always the guest of honor.

Now another year passes with icons of TV passing into ancestry. Granted, I never knew any of the these people, even though they were part of my extended family as much or more as most of my blood relatives. May each long live in the minds and hearts they entertained as a tribute to their diligence and craft.