[TOO] SMART TV [F, 7-30-21]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

The TV guy came, to install our new “smart” TV. We’ve needed a new TV set for some time, at least that’s what Helen has said for some time. We couldn’t get one, though, because we couldn’t let potential covid19 carriers into the house. The TV guy is the first outsider in our house for over a year.

Some people just go to a store and buy a TV and bring it home and read the instruction manual, and hook it up themselves. Not us. We couldn’t just buy one ourselves and plug it in, because the TV is smarter than we are. It is compatible with stuff we don’t understand, like variable microbeabouts and occasional weimaraners. At least, I think that’s what the TV guy said.

Helen said we need a new TV because ours was not “smart,” and did not allow for “streaming” and other nautical possibilities. I think the real reason was that she was getting tired of climbing up on the roof, wearing a tinfoil hat, to turn the antenna 30 degrees so that it lined up with the transmitter in Paducah, whenever we wanted to watch “Hee Haw.”

That’s the way it used to be, the first time I saw TV, the 1949 World Series between the Dodgers and Yankees. Uncle Johnny and I wanted to see our home boy, Gil Hodges, in the Series.

The World Series, between the same two teams, was first broadcast in 1947, but only in the general New York area. TV expanded rapidly in the next two years, though, even to the 600 people of Francisco, Indiana… sort of.

My mother’s youngest brother, John Hubert Pond, had returned home from the Marines at the end of WWII and built, with his own hands, the store and lumber shed for Francisco Hardware and Lumber. At the same time, my family had moved from Indianapolis to a tiny hard-scrabble farm outside Oakland City, five miles from Mother’s home town of Francisco.

I was ten years old, a lonely boy, displaced from a bustling city to an isolated farm. Uncle Johnny understood what it was like to be a lonely boy. He had been ten when his father was killed in a coal mine cave-in. For all my youth, he was my best friend, and the best man at my wedding.

So, whenever he was able, he included me in stuff that was interesting, including watching the World Series on the first TV set in Francisco, in the hardware store. “Watching” may be stretching it a bit.

The “local” TV station was in Evansville, 30 miles away. To get the signal, Uncle Johnny had mounted an antenna on the roof. To get the signal just right, he had to climb up on the roof and turn the antenna slowly while I yelled from below when he got it situated just right, which was never. We saw some shadowy forms through the “snow” on the tiny screen [13 inches, I believe], and the garbled voices of the announcers, Mel Allen and Red Barber. [1]

Later, when there were several Evansville stations, Uncle Johnny mounted an antenna crank on the side of the store, so that he could turn the antenna toward a different transmitter when we wanted to watch a different channel without having to climb up onto the roof.

I think we’d be better off if that were as far as TV went. I mean, who needs more than “off the roof?” “Smart” TVs? I don’t think I want a TV that is smarter than I am.

John Robert McFarland

[1] The internet says they did only radio, not TV, but they are the iconic and remembered baseball voices of my youth. Jim Britt was the TV announcer.