The Limited TV Joys of a 1970s Boy

If I wanted to right now, I can call up anything on my iPhone, from music to a TV show that’s been on in the last….well since ever it was first played. And I can do it on an airplane, sitting on my couch, or even best of all, the toilet; no more MAD magazines to look through while I was sitting there doing some of my best work.

Thinking back to when I was a young whipper snapper (as opposed to the old whipper snapper I am now) the contrast between what we had back then and now, is quite amazing.

Music came in many formats, all very sketchy and scratchy. Vinyl records had been around a while and would pop and crackle as if they were the musical version of Rice Krispies, and skip ahead or repeat if you had scratched it. But albums had cool cover art, and liner notes - that paper sleeve you tucked the record in before putting it in the cardboard album. They would often include lyrics or other notes about the music. Today? Yeah, they come with front-side cover art, but that’s about it. Blah.

Some portability came with cassette tapes thanks to the Sony Walkman, and in-car decks. You had to fast forward or rewind and hopefully find the track you wanted to listen to, a game only the most talented in time compression comprehension could master. Then of course was the awful realization that something was wrong as the tape started sounding weird, and you quickly tried to pop out the tape, only to find yes, it had started unwind in the tape playing mechanism. With a pencil tip and the steady hand of a brain surgeon, you might be able to get it back to normal, carefully turning the sprockets in the cassette,, or, you might be left with a ruined cassette and a pile of brown spaghetti.

Sure you could play music roulette with your radio, hoping John Astolfi or Bruce Dana might play your track, or request it at night with WSLB’s request hour, where lovers would send coded musical messages to that certain other person whose first name was the only info you had about what was going on, much like the game Clue. “Jenny with Joe in the library with the questionable use of a candlestick” would be an example guess.

Today we have about 36,000 channels to pick from on TV or the Internet today. Back in the 70s in the ‘burg, I think we had like 3 or 4 channels. One was the Ogdensburg Cable channel’s scanning of meteorological dials, as it would pan slowly back and forth constantly at analog dials. In black and white. We also had one or two out of Canada, WWNY from Watertown, and WPIX out of NYC. I don’t remember any more than that. They’d go off at midnight signing off with the national anthem, a final goodbye to the day. Ah, then Saturday morning cartoons, laying on the floor in front of the console TV that was a big heavy piece of furniture, one you had to get up and change the channel to; only later on did the advent of a remote channel changer come into play, ushering in the era of endless channel surfing and obesity.  We’d watch Looney Tunes, HR Puffenstuff, the Banana Splits, and other mind-numbing, but awesome, TV. If you were lucky, your mom would let you do it while eating your favorite sugar (made with some corn) cereal.

We lived just fine without the internet and had innumerable ways to entertain our eyes and ears - it was done by going outside, engaging other people in the flesh, getting exercise, and engaging the world at large.

That was the best entertainment of all.