TV Killed the Radio Star

My stepfather is going to be 72 this year and my mom is going to be 64. The eight year difference between them has turned out to be significant in only one way-- in that my stepfather grew up listening to the radio and my mom grew up watching TV.

My stepfather watches lots of TV now that he's retired, especially shows like Jeopardy and anything involving Bill Moyers. When I was growing up though, he always had an aversion to passive TV watching, as though it wasn't hard-wired in him to relax in front of it. He basically grew up in the '40s and his family had one of those gigantic, tombstone-shaped radios in the living room. He would talk about listening to shows like "Blondie", "The Shadow", and "Mutt and Jeff", shows that sounded just as idiotic as the ones I grew up with, just with no video to accompany them. When my stepfather went off to college in 1955, he came back one weekend and his parents had bought a TV. By that point it was too late for him to develop a habit of vacantly staring at it every day for hours on end.

Not so for my mom though. Her parents got a TV in the early '50s when she was still in elementary school. She remembers watching "Howdy Doody", "Leave it Beaver", and "The Honeymooners", and all those old-timey shows. She developed a healthy TV-watching addiction that she happily passed on to her children.

Within a generation there will be no one around anymore who didn't grow up with television, and the facts that when I was little we had one TV that was in black and white, that we didn't get a TV with a remote control and a VCR until I was 10, and that we didn't get cable until I was in jr. high, will seem quaint and archaic.