IS TV OVER LIKE NEWSPAPERS?

The first TV I ever set eyes on what at my Caffrey Grandparents house. I was there for a summer visit of a week or two. Those grandparents had a beautiful home with lots of fun places to explore. There was a kind of no longer used apartment area over the garage where, according to me mater, some Irish working families lived as they built the house during the depression. If my memory serves , they did the beautiful tile work.

My Grandmother, Nellie, had an upstairs enclosed sun room where she did her sewing. She decorated her own hats with fabulous imagination. Bird cages, beads, lots of ribbons, fake jewels, feathers all adorned her lovely hats. I was enchanted. There also was an enormous cellar with washing and drying rooms, huge coal bins, and wooden doors that I never opened.

But, that particular summer, in the downstairs sun porch, was the new TV. It was a huge box, of very polished wood with a seven inch screen. All those tubes it took to make the magic must have needed a lot of space.

There was not much programing in the early days of TV. But there was something on that I couldn't stop watching. All my usual patterns of entertainment were eroded by the highly compelling McCarthy Hearings. Joe Mc. Was perhaps the first fucked up person I had gotten to see in action. The pain and the anger and the feeling that this was BIG trapped my attention.For those who don't know about this horror, it was the House investigation on Un-American activities. It was a giant witch hunt for communists that destroyed the lives of countless Americans. In later years, I had the same reaction to the Watergate Hearings and the Iran Contra Hearings.

Other high points in my limited childhood viewing were The first time Elvis was on the Ed Sullivan Show.  We had a TV by then. It was in the fifties and out TV was in the living room and my parents had company for dinner. I was forbidden to have the TV on but kept creeping in and checking whether Elvis had made his debut yet. When he at last came on, at the very end of the show. I turned it up full blast and started screaming. Weird, he just had that effect on us. Same deal with the Beatles except I was in college by then.

Our viewing was very limited. I think at one point we got two shows a week, and our parents were a lot more liberal than some of our friends who's parents still wouldn't allow any TV. Hard to picture.
You all know how the scene played out over the next forty years, until families had TVs in every room and there were hundreds of channels. Have you ever watched Soldier of Fortune's 'new weapons' channel? Or one of our favorite's: the surgery channel? We quit that after watching varicose veins being stripped while eating a chicken dinner.

But now, I have been in homes where on a very social occasion everyone is in the den, each with their handheld widget, maybe watching a show or maybe talking to friends or maybe writing what they think of someone on spillit while checking the weather, ordering shoes, doing homework and watching reruns of Big Love at the same time.

I assume that the idea of people gathering together at a certain time to watch a show together and sitting through the ads is nearing prehistoric. I, for one, don't really see any loss. No one ever sat with me during those Congressional hearings, anyways.