Odd O'blography

Watch This!

Shadow Prowler-Spreading Love posted an interesting note today:

"Note: Keeping my mouth shut has paid off. The last few w..."

Her story of rescuing a large flat-screen TV from the trash reminded me of high-school days when I used to fiddle around with broken radios and TV's. Helpful folks from around the neighborhood would give me their cast-offs, much to my mother's annoyance. I fixed one once in a while, but not very often.

At one time, I had a 21-inch console television (remember those?) in my bedroom. It had a dead picture tube, and I couldn't afford to replace it. So, I put a 12-inch black & white set (remember black & white?) with no audio atop the console. Yes, it looked pretty silly, but I was the only one in my peer group who could watch TV in their bedroom. And the sound on the console was excellent!

For a couple of years, I had to get up and twist two knobs to change the channel on both sets (remember the satisfying 'clunk' of the big channel-changer knob?). It made channel surfing awkward, but we only got two over-the-air channels in rural Montana, so it wasn't much of a hardship.

When I was a senior, my uncle gave me a fairly new 19-inch 'portable' that didn't survive a lightning strike on his power pole. It was the only thing in his house that wouldn't turn on after the transformer was replaced. He wanted one of the new color sets, so he wasn't all that upset about losing it. I found that the on/off switch on the volume control knob had been burned out by the power surge. I wrapped some copper wire around the switch contacts, plugged it in, and the TV worked perfectly. The only problem was that I couldn't turn it off. But hey, the power cord was easy to unplug!

I always meant to buy a new on/off/volume switch, but never got around to it. I took that set to college and it was still in use for the first year that my wife and I were married. I was almost sorry to replace it with our first remote-control color set in 1980. Not!