When I Was a Little Boy

“When I was a little boy . . .”, the opening words of a tale told by a grandfather to his grandchild.

When I was a little boy, telephones were black, sat on a table and actually had to be dialed.  I remember the first push-button phones.  I remember the first stream-lined ‘Princess’ phones that came in a variety of colors.  I remember that you could dial long-distance direct, or you could place a call through the operator asking to ‘call collect’ or ‘person-to-person’.  In those days, when people traveled, they seldom made long-distance calls.  It was too expensive.  Instead, they wrote letters and sent postcards.

When I was a little boy, I listened to music on my record player.  I remember my first ‘hi-fi stereo’.  Records were vinyl, easily scratched and warped.  Single song records were called '45’s', the speed at which they played.  The larger records played at ‘78’, that is until the first LP’s (long-playing records) came along and they played at ‘33’.  For laughs, we would play 45 records at a 78 speed.  I could make The Kingston Trio sound just like The Chipmunks.

When I was a little boy, I remember my grandfather buying one of the first color television sets.  It was a big piece of furniture, sticking out a few feet into the room.  In those days, most of the T.V. shows were still in black and white, but a few were in ‘living color’.  You had to get out of your chair to change the channel, at least until my grandfather bought one of the first remote control T.V.s.  You had to constantly turn knobs to adjust the color and use the horizontal control so the picture wouldn’t roll.

When I was a little boy, there were five channels to choose from; ABC, NBC, CBS, a local station and the educational channel.  All the stations signed off-the-air by midnight to the tune of the Star-Spangled Banner and came back on-the-air by 6:00 or 7:00 the next morning.  On Saturday mornings, before anyone ever heard of binge-watching, my cousin and I would binge-watch cartoons. On Sunday nights my parents would watch Ed Sullivan.  During the remainder of the week, I would watch an assortment of Westerns, variety-shows and sitcoms complete with all the commercials.  To this day, I can recite many of the commercial jingles.

When I was a little boy, the content of television shows was tightly regulated.  It was all ‘family friendly’.  Married couples slept apart in twin beds and women did housework in dresses and pearls.  T.V. portrayed a sanitized, fantasy version of mostly white upper-middle-class families, nothing at all like real life.  But, when I was a little boy, I didn’t know any better.

When I was a little boy, children watched on average about 2 hours of television each day. Televisions were the only screens. Today, children spend 7 or 8 hours daily in front of some kind of screen or other.  When my mother said to turn off the T.V. there was only one screen in the house for her to worry about.  And what did I do with those extra 6 hours in a day?  I played with my toys.  I read lots of books.  I learned to play board games and card games.  I played outside with the neighbors.  I got together, face-to-face, with my friends.  I had conversations with the grown-ups.  And, with no screens to distract me, I loved listening to my grandfather tell me tales about when he was a little boy.