Ever Watch "Zoom"...? Me, Not So Much

 This popped up on my X feed today. It took me back, but not too far back. Yes, the show Zoom aired when I was a child--I was their target audience, but I didn't watch it very often. That's why I don't remember it like I remember Sesame Street and The Electric Company.

Why those two and not the other one?

Because my dad built our TV.

It's strange thinking about it. A television is not something someone can built like a bookshelf or a roast beef sandwich. Yes, we can build a computer nowadays. Just order all the parts and put it together. My son did it. Millions of people have done it. Back in the 1960s, my father did the same thing, but with a TV.

Back then, they sold Heathkit TVs. You assemble the parts and put them together. You plug it in, turn it on, and you can watch the four networks available at that time. Four networks...that was it. No cable, no satellites, no internet. For me, I didn't know there were four channels. Our TV only had three. It wasn't until I went to Kindergarten that I realized the forth channel existed. That's when they wheeled in a TV and played and episode of Sesame Street. Never knew it existed. All my Kindergarten classmates cheered when they began the show. For me, it was all new.

I don't know why our TV didn't get PBS...maybe one of the vacuum tubes didn't work. That's what powered the TV...vacuum tubes. After my father died, we tried keeping the old TV running for a few years. I remember a repairman coming to our house and after replacing a few tubes, it worked again. Decades later when our friends who bought my mom's house after she died ripped up the bushes in the front yard, we found several old vacuum tubes buried beneath the bushes. They brought back memories.

I don't remember much about Zoom. I don't think they thought it would play well in class. I wonder whatever happened to the Zoom kids. Did they grow up to be productive members of society? Did they turn to a life of crime once the bright lights of the Zoom stage turned off forever? Probably a little of both.

Zoom...just part of the world in which we lived.

Yeah...That's The Back Of Our TV

 You're seeing a picture of the back of one of our TVs because this afternoon, I hooked up a sound bar to better experience the wonder that is television. We found the cheapest sound bar we could find (and I do mean cheap...). It's amazing how advanced TVs have come in less than a century.

The first TV I remember was not an RCA, or Curtis Mathis, or Magnavox. No, it was a Heathkit. If you're not familiar with Heathkit, it was the Ikea of TVs. Basically, you built it yourself. The first TV I watched was built by my father. It ran on vacuum tubes, and it didn't get the public television channels, so no Sesame Street, no Big Bird and the like. The first time I ever saw a muppet was when I attended kindergarten and they wheeled in a TV for all us to watch. I don't remember a lot about kindergarten, but I do remember all the kids knew exactly what the show was and I had no clue.

Fast forward a half a century. TVs have changed, like everything else. They're smaller and larger. They're cheaper and more expensive. They're modern marvels of technological advancement, and this afternoon if we had the newest model of a Samsung TV, I would have been able to simply hook up the HDMI cable that came with the sound bar to the HDMI connection in the TV dedicated exclusively to an audio output.

But, because the TV is a few years old, our particular TV has no dedicated audio output for an HDMI cable. I had to find another way to get the sound bar to work. It took a while, but I did it. The reason I took a picture is because the TV currently sits in a corner of the room and I was unable to see the back of the TV clearly, so I took a picture and that helped me hook things up.

My dad was an amazing man. I can't imagine what he would think of the world in which we live. I'm sure he would think much of what we take as "everyday" would be overwhelming.

And he'd be right. Oh, and the fact that I could use a portable device to snap a picture and see it immediately and be able to manipulate it and attach the picture instantaneously to a blog, well...that would blow his mind as well.