I might as well begin by confessing I’m not a part of the television world.

When I was 15, television came to Denver.  Within a couple of weeks, my dad, who owned what would be called a thrift store today, came home with the first television set on the block.  Within a week, it blacked out.

 Then he showed up with another set.  Brand named Dumont.  Its cabinet was large and its screen was small and round.  The picture was supposed to be black and white but it was more blue and gray.  Most of the shows crashed on a regular bases and a sign would come on the screen “One Minute Please…”  Little did anyone living in the 600 block of North Elati think that times were changing as we watched Dwight D. Eisenhower, or Ike as he was generally called, become the 34th President of the United States.

 So the fall of 1952 began the change of everything to the point that today, my six and eight year old granddaughters have their own TV sets, videos, and know how to run games on their parent’s computers.  It makes me more than a little curious as to how they view the world.  Certainly they can’t imagine it with out television, the way it was when I grew up.

 And now, at age 71, I’m going to see television as I’ve known it go dark.  Oh, I’m going to hook a converter box between the aerial and my aging Sanyo television and then, just as I did over 55 years ago, turn the set on and see what appears on the screen, which is about eight times larger than the one in the old days.

 Actually, having gotten half the way through high school without a television set, I really don’t care much one way or another.  But since, at the moment, I can get a decent to excellent picture on all the channels with a pair of rabbit ears that looks very much like the ones that came out of the 1950’s, I’m in no mood to shell out more bucks for cable, especially since I don’t watch television that much to start with.

So sometime in your life your memory kicks in and you begin to remember everything that happens after that time.  Everything before was history.  For me, flight didn’t begin at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina with the Wright Brothers.  It began at Roswell in 1947 with little green men.  Cars did begin with the Model T.  Cars began with big black clunky boxes on wheels with running boards on the sides.  Maybe for you, games began not with checkers but with Pacman, the amazing electronic ghost guzzler.

So I’ve gone through the first television age and lived long enough to enter the second one.  But I don’t care what kind of hype the television stations and government tries to get us to swallow, things just aren’t always better the second time around.

- Bob