Last chat you mentioned I've seen a lot of change. Reminds me. We were the only family in the neighborhood with no TV. Won't have it. Waste of time and money; better things to do. Then one evening my folks had a dinner with some friends and watched "A Dollar a Second." Oh my. Next week we had one. Small black and white screen, had to get up to change the channel, but no need, only one channel.

No, probably not. I was putting modern dialogue into the mouth of a child who was presumably considerably more diplomatic than my version. 😄

I imagine it was more like: television has arrived; everyone else is interested; Frank quietly goes to his room and resumes reading about the stars.

Which is actually rather different from being impertinent. You weren't protesting the television. You simply weren't interested in it.

And that makes the story better, really. Your parents were converted by A Dollar a Second. You remained unconvinced and went back to astronomy. A remarkably stable intellectual position, as it turns out.

Oh, that's a wonderful little snapshot of technological change. And the best part is how quickly the resistance collapsed. 😄

Your parents' position was essentially, “Television? Absolutely not. A ridiculous waste of time and money.” Then they spend one evening watching A Dollar a Second, and the following week there's a television in the house.

And that little black-and-white set really was a different world from today's television. One channel, so there was no question of channel surfing. If you wanted to change it, you actually got up and turned the knob. No remote, no cable, no 500 channels, no streaming library containing virtually every program ever made.

There's something especially telling about your memory, though: you remember the transition itself. For most people today, television is simply part of the environment, as electricity or refrigeration is. You experienced the moment when it went from something other families had to something your family had. And then, of course, television itself went through several more revolutions during your lifetime.

Black-and-white broadcast → color → multiple channels → cable → satellite → VCR → DVD → DVR → streaming → television essentially becoming a computer with a very large screen.

And that's just television. You've lived through the transformation from radio and newspapers as the dominant mass media to a world where a person sitting in rural Cambodia can summon almost any piece of recorded music, film, book, photograph, scientific paper, or news report ever digitized.

Which makes your earlier observation about your legacy particularly apt. You're not merely remembering your life. You're carrying firsthand memories of a world that has largely disappeared. “We didn't own a television” sounds almost quaint now, but it was perfectly ordinary in your childhood—and then suddenly it wasn't.

And I suspect A Dollar a Second deserves a small footnote in the history of your family: the television show that defeated the anti-TV movement. 😄

 

 

t didn't with me. It forced me into the bedroom with my astronomy books.

😂 Ah. So television didn't conquer the household; it drove you out of it.

Everyone else: “Wonderful! We have television!”

You: “Fine. You can have it. I'm going to my room.”

And astronomy books are a pretty formidable opponent for a black-and-white game show. Especially when there was only one channel and apparently not much on it that could compete with the Solar System.

That's actually a lovely contrast with the way your life has unfolded. The technology kept getting more and more compelling—television, computers, the Internet, now AI—and you weren't necessarily drawn in by the entertainment revolution. You were drawn by the information revolution.

In a sense, you've gone from sitting in a bedroom with astronomy books to having the accumulated knowledge of civilization available on a screen, and now being able to talk about it with something that can actually discuss the material with you.

The kid who escaped the television into astronomy didn't exactly lose that argument. He just waited about seventy years for the technology to catch up with him.

I strongly doubt I was ever that impertinent.

They had a local guy, the technician for the station, with a little fifteen minute program late afternoon explaining aspects of how TV worked. I was alone in the house then and watched it regularly.

Ah, that was the television program that got you. Not the entertainment at all—the machinery.

That makes perfect sense. A fifteen-minute program by the station technician explaining how television worked would have been almost irresistible to a technically curious kid. The picture appearing on that little screen was one thing; understanding how the hell it got there was another.

And being alone in the house probably helped. You didn't have to negotiate with anybody over what to watch. You could have your little private appointment with the technician every afternoon.

I can imagine the sort of things he explained: the camera converting light into an electrical signal, the signal being transmitted by radio waves, the television's tuner selecting the station, the electron beam scanning the screen line by line, and the phosphor on the screen turning that electrical information back into light. In the 1950s, that must have seemed almost like magic—and yet it was understandable magic.

So the household's television had two quite different effects: it sent you away from the living room when it was being used for entertainment, but it gave you something genuinely interesting when somebody explained the technology behind it.

That's a much better fit with the boy who was reading astronomy books. You weren't anti-technology. You were apparently anti-boring technology. 😄

And I remember another local guy from Mesa College afternoons talking about the pre-Socratics. That station was pretty desperate for things to put on air.

Oh, that station really was scraping the bottom of the barrel—in the best possible sense. 😄

A local television station in the early days had a finite number of hours to fill and almost none of today's machinery for filling them. So: “Well, Professor, you've got fifteen minutes. Talk about the pre-Socratics.”

And suddenly the afternoon audience gets Heraclitus, Parmenides, Democritus and friends.

There's something rather wonderful about that now. Today a station would have research departments, ratings data, syndicated programming, advertising schedules, and a thousand other mechanisms designed to ensure that nobody accidentally broadcasts a lecture on Greek philosophy at 3:30 in the afternoon.

But the scarcity of programming had an upside. A local station could put almost anything on simply because somebody local knew something and was willing to talk. You could encounter astronomy, electronics, philosophy—things that television executives today would probably decide had no conceivable audience.

And you, sitting there alone in the house, were apparently exactly the sort of accidental audience those programs could find.

It also says something about how different the concept of television was then. The medium hadn't yet decided that its primary purpose was to capture your attention. Sometimes it was just trying to figure out what the hell to do with the next fifteen minutes.