Author: Edward Guenther
Uploaded: November 11th, 2011
October, 1959. We had gone over to Aunt Mamie’s and Uncle Heini’s several times to watch TV. To the big people this was quite an invention but for me I’d rather have been outside on the country hillside.
Prior to TV our habit had been to gather round the old wood stove to listen to radio dramas. That stove was the center of the home before TV came into the house. Before school in the morning, we’d all gather round it for warmth. It had holes around the side and you had to be careful because sometimes coals would pop out onto the wood floor. We’d smudge them out with a piece of wood or roll them onto the thin metal sheet the stove sat on. Pa, he liked to “burn the chimney out” by getting a real hot fire going. He wasn’t satisfied unless the stovepipe was red hot up past the second elbow!
Oftentimes we would be out of electricity, sometimes for days at a time. Like that time in 1968 when we got 3 feet of snow in one night. We knew it was 3 feet because it went over the yardstick that we had planted in the snow the night before. Pa had us shovel the roof for fear of its weight. I knew he had a fever because you should have seen how hot and red he looked when Ma took his picture while he was trying to drive the car out in that big snowfall. It was days before he got out. But we kept shoveling.
Anyway, it was times like this when we had to cook on the old wood-stove. Once in cold, snowy weather I put my frost bitten hands to close to the hot stove and, you bet, they hurt awful bad.
Well, that old wood stove was the hub all right.
Then we got our first TV. Richy was on the roof holding the antenna and Davy was in the bathroom the open window to relay messages up and down. We watched that TV until the picture looked good, then we’d send the massage, “Hold it right there,”’ to Rich the antenna man. At first I think he was up there cause he wanted to climb on the roof but after awhile it seemed like he wasn’t so happy as we fiddled with all the tubes and dials. As we watched Lawrence Weld I noticed the picture lashing from one couple dancing to another. Then somebody got smart and noticed it was the same couple but the picture screen was rolling. I guess the TV salesman had warned us about that, eventually somebody located the dial that balanced it out.
And so we had our first TV with Bonanza, Walt Disney, Gun-smoke, and Leave it to Beaver. Everybody sat around the TV now instead of the old stove. But on a cold winter day with no electricity, you could still count on that old wood stove!