Memorial Day

Memorial Day was on May 25, 2015. As our typical observance of that day my husband and I bought a few flowers and ventured to the different family cemetery plots of both of our families in Idaho Falls, Shelton/Ririe, Blackfoot and American Falls. As usual, we talked about our memories of our loved ones from the vantage point of our own experiences and from what our parents have shared. This has always been a tradition our family enjoyed when the kids were all home. Not being here, one of my daughters expressed her desire to hear our stories of that day. With that said, I’ve decided to share on my blog a new story that my husband dictated to me as we drove to American Falls to the gravesite of his parents. The following is his story. The picture I painted is of his home in Arbon Valley, mentioned in the story. I painted it shortly after we returned from our day trip. It was a fun-filled-memory Memorial Day! By the way, for those of you my age or older who like to reminisce about the past, his story will conjure up some very familiar memories of your own, as most of his story is not unique just to him. For those too young to remember television in its infancy, this story might be somewhat entertaining. I hope you enjoy reading it.

My husband’s story:

Mother really was inherently kind. Most outsiders would likely say to a fault, in that she often let others wants and needs push hers aside. She would most times become involved in family projects to the exclusion, or at least the putting off, of what she would have seen as a priority. It was just her nature and heart and soul to be outward looking to the needs of others rather than focused on herself.  With her help and encouragement it was almost magical what she could do to encourage others to achieve.

Mom was an expert at being entertained by life. This resulted in her being interested in what everyone else was doing; most noticeably her family. Rather than being absorbed or looking to her own desires and interests she loved to become part of her family’s dreams and aspirations. She was a true example of the attribute of charity towards others, especially her family. She loved becoming and read constantly, but rather than trying to overtly teach, she just passed on that quest-like love for personal development and education to her friends and family. Mother was the great encourager in everything she said or did. Let me give you an example.

While television was available generally much earlier in cities it came late to rural Idaho. All of the broadcasting in Eastern Idaho was located in the Idaho Falls area. It required a fairly substantial antenna to get any reasonable signal strength very far away from the broadcast towers located out on the desert. I can remember going to my grandparents’ house in Blackfoot and watching Lawrence Welk and Ed Sullivan in the late 50’s and early 60’s. As a family we had moved to Arbon Valley in the late 50’s and I can remember getting our first television set which I think was one that came from mother’s parents. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a sufficient antenna to really obtain any reception so I don’t recall being able to watch much television while we were in Arbon.

Television in those days in our area was wholly black and white and of course, purely analog and dependent upon  vacuum tube technology. As a practical matter, that meant that the circuits were very unstable and necessitated tuning and adjustment almost on a constant bases. Furthermore, the nature of vacuum tubes required that they warm up so when you turned the television on you always had to wait several minutes before you could begin to tune or adjust the picture. Most often, if the signal was weak you simply saw fuzzy looking interference which was labeled as “snow” due to loss of signal. By far the most common viewing was a program interwoven with occasional “snowstorms.” On top of tuning and adjusting constantly, you had to change channels by turning the knob on the television set, since the remote control was an unheard of future invention. In fact, I can remember going to Salt Lake City to my Aunt and Uncle’s home, Grace and Kelly Kellogg’s, and seeing for the first time, a rudimentary remote control which allowed you to do one thing, and one thing only, simply change the stations by rotating a dial from one to thirteen sequentially. Not only did our TV not have a remote, we were only able to receive two out of the three channels available in our area with a copious amount of tinfoil attached to our rabbit-ear antenna.

When we moved to American Falls in the early 60’s we still had the television that we had used out in Arbon and I remember watching “I Love Lucy”, “Jack LaLanne”, and “Art Linkletter”. In so doing, you always had to sit within a few feet of the television because the signal strength would vary and as a result the horizontal and vertical stabilization would change. What this meant, in terms of viewing enjoyment, was that the picture would constantly roll and shift horizontally so you couldn’t see any picture at all. For those who have never experienced this phenomena, imagine if you will watching a picture with a line rotating either from the top of the screen slowly down through the picture or slowly rising from the bottom and disappearing off the top of the screen and taking the picture with it. So while the great part of television is that it is a motion picture, a “motion-motion” picture is absolutely worthless and simply annoying. So you had to crawl up to the television and gingerly adjust the horizontal and vertical knobs provided inconveniently on the back of the TV cabinet, which meant that without help you could hardly see the picture while trying to adjust it. Most often you would no sooner stop the picture from rolling up and down and get back to your chair that it would lose the vertical stabilization so you would be looking at a picture that was akin to watching through bars slanted from one corner of the television set to the other. Television in its infancy was also essentially exercise equipment, we just didn’t know that yet.

All of this leads up to the absolute joy when technology improved with the introduction of transistors and better antenna and broadcast capabilities. I remember clearly driving out to my Uncle’s house in Lavaside near Blackfoot to watch the Apollo moon landing in July of 1969. Uncle Gaylen had just purchased their first color TV and although the moon landing wasn’t in color and looked a little grainy and far away, it was a marvelous improvement over anything that I’d ever experienced on our set. The quality of the video from the moon 280 thousand miles away was better than in my home. Our family actually got a new colored television for the first time in the fall of 1970. We were finally able to move our old TV to the basement where it remained for several years.

And now for the purpose of this whole story is to tell you about mother. You see, we were cleaning out the basement at one point and the focus became that old television and whether it had outlived it’s usefulness. It should have been obvious to anyone that repairing something that didn’t work to begin with was not a real logical idea. Although mom was probably surprised when I initially asked her to keep it,  extolling my intent to repair it, rather than dash my hopes or question my abilities, mother kindly asked what it would take to fix it. I, of course, had no experience in television repair which prompted mother to ask how long it would take, and I ultimately arrived at the realization that it would take a million years. Mother knew she was unlikely to ever see that TV operational, but she certainly never even hinted anything was impossible if you set your mind to it. We joked and laughed many times after that conversation as to how I was progressing on my TV restoration project. Needless to say, this TV never was repaired and I’m not quite sure what happened to it, but I’m sure it ultimately made it to the landfill where it should have been many years earlier.