TV

Gratitude 6/27/2025

I am grateful for the gift of a new day.

My heart is filled with gratitude for the many blessings I have.

I will appreciate the small joys and express my thanks in all circumstances.

Let my attitude of gratitude bring joy to others.

Starting last night after getting home from Stewart’s medical procedure (which was all clear), but which left both of us wiped out, we binge watched season four of The Bear. I am so grateful for wonderful television!

I still have my grandparent’s 1949 Crosley entertainment center from the 1950s with its eight inch TV screen. We use it as the stand for our TV in the bedroom. The last time I plugged it in, the screen did light up, but no reception. I do have a dim memory of watching this TV in the late 1950s rolling and rolling while someone had to continually adjust the vertical hold.

Last week I watched the Pee Wee Herman documentary, which I thought was so interesting. Pee Wee was really influenced by his childhood TV experience. He was just three years older than me, so I knew exactly what he was talking about. For kids in the 1950s and early 60s (I was too young for Kukla, Fran, and Ollie, which ended in 1957) there were programs like Captain Kangaroo, Romper Room, Soupy Sales, and Shari Lewis. Romper Room was locally produced. In Washington, D.C. it was hosted by Miss Connie. My friend Carol and I sent in our tissue paper “duck” art and Carol’s was selected to be displayed on TV. (I was so jealous!) Miss Connie saw us through her magic mirror. Miss Connie taught me to Bend and Stretch and I sing that to my granddaughter!

In the 1960s, television got even more exciting. We had one black and white tv with tubes. Although my dad referred the TV as the “Boob Tube” or the “Idiot Box,” he would watch a whole lot of shows with us. It was even ok to watch sports DURING THE DAY on the weekends, even though the rest of the time, he told us to “Go outside and play.” We also got to watch TV during the day if we were sick!

Next door, the babysitter, Mrs. Fling, had the TV on during the day. Until I went to 1st grade in 1961, I watched reruns of I Love Lucy in the mornings with her and Janet, her daughter who was a year younger than I was. Mrs. Fling watched soap operas in the afternoon, while we played. But when my sisters got off school, we had an afternoon TV lineup of Make Room for Daddy, the Mickey Mouse Club, the Rifleman, and Robin Hood with Richard Greene.

In the evenings we loved watching comedies like Get Smart, but also enjoyed I Spy, Mission Impossible, and The Twilight Zone. We watched Saturday Night at the Movies, with commercials, just about every week.

My mom was more relaxed about TV and would let us watch sitcoms like That Girl, Green Acres, Bewitched, My Favorite Martian, The Flying Nun, I Dream of Jeannie, and the Dick Van Dyke Show. I can still sing the lyrics to a lot of the opening songs of these sitcoms. There were a bunch of these shows I really didn’t like all that much like Mr. Ed, My Mother the Car, and Petticoat Junction, but I watched them anyway! Because I preferred them to other shows that were on in that time slot.

I remember the excitement of the new shows coming out in the fall. I would schedule my week around what was on TV. Although we had lobbied for a color TV, my dad would always say that we have a color TV. “It’s brown!”

Sometime around 1970, our brown tube TV bit the dust, and my dad refused to get it repaired. Luckily, I was babysitting age, so I watched TV after I put my charges to bed.

I didn’t watch much TV at all in college. I had a really old and tired black and white TV that had a clothes hanger antenna, but I did follow the Watergate hearings in the summer of 1973 and got introduced to Saturday Night Live in 1975.

We moved that clunker TV to the farm in 1976. Then we bought a little portable TV. But my husband, like my dad, didn’t like having it on, especially during meals. I had put it in the bay window, but after our little daughter Charlotte started imitating Vanna White, we banished the TV during meals.

I remember the day we got our first color TV in the early 1980s. We turned out the lights and watched a baseball game. Oh, the greens were so green. It was so fun to watch Hill Street Blues and the NBC Thursday night line up, Cosby Show, Family Ties, Cheers, Night Court, LA Law in “living color!”

In the late 1980s we got a VHS player and overnight, we were not confined to a TV schedule and could watch some shows and movies over and over. We borrowed lots of movies and children’s programs from the library and spend a lot of time at Blockbuster and other video rental establishments.

In the 1990s, we got a satellite dish and suddenly had unlimited channels. There was a time I couldn’t imagine “paying” for TV, but that ship sailed away when we subscribed to the satellite service.

Now we have a YOUTUBE Internet subscription with Disney Channel and HBO and I think a couple other services. We can basically watch anything we want to watch any time. We enjoyed Ted Lasso, and Hacks, which were released at the rate of one program per week. But seasons of two series, Somebody, Somewhere and The Bear we have really loved, were released all at once and we binge watched them. I am so impressed with the quality of the stories, the camera work, the writing, and the acting of so many programs today. They are so much better than the best shows I watched as a kid.

There is nothing like watching TV when there is a weather warning or when news is breaking. I like to watch PBS News Hour to keep up, too. I find it to be well balanced, with international, science, and arts coverage, not just political news. Because it’s an hour program, they can explain and cover more things in depth than the network news can. The opinion coverage is a short conversation on Mondays and Fridays of multiple sides of an issue. I also like documentary programs like NOVA, Frontline, and American Experience. And I absolutely love Antiques Road Show and Finding Your Roots.

When I look back, I recognize that TV has been a big part of my life. Although I haven’t kept up with lots of the big shows now and references to White Lotus, Succession, and even The Wire, are lost on me, TV throughout my life has really added to my cultural awareness and participation. Every program I have ever watched has added to my personal narrative. I can remember stories from programs I saw over sixty years ago! I am so grateful that I have the opportunity to choose from a wide variety of programming these days to get information and be entertained.