Terry Tales

Watch This

In high-school, I used to fiddle around with broken radios and TV's. The basic design of these sets was pretty similar across the various brands, so I'd try to use parts from one to repair another. Helpful folks from around the neighborhood would often give me their cast-offs, much to my mother's annoyance. I fixed one once in a while, but not very often.

For a while, I had a console television crammed into my bedroom. The picture tube was bad, and I couldn't afford to replace it. I put a 12-inch black & white set with a dead speaker atop the console. Yes, it looked kind of silly, but I was the only one in my peer group who could watch TV in their bedroom. And the sound from the console was excellent! For a year or so, I got up and twisted two knobs to change the channel on both sets. It made channel surfing awkward, but we only got two over-the-air channels in rural Montana, so it wasn't that great a hardship.

When I was a senior in high school, my uncle Roy 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 trailer that didn't turn on after the transformer was replaced. He wanted a new color set, so he wasn't all that upset about losing it. I found that the on/off part of 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 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!