Television With Pliers

McLuhan's Nightmare

A Very Good Man of the Depression Era

It is not an exaggeration for me to claim that if I was to watch television in my home growing up in the urbane metropolis of Clinton, Tennessee during the years of 1963 to 1968 I had to employ the use of a pair of flat-nose pliers. My father's thriftiness is legendary. He grew up in the North Jersey of the 30's and may have lived in 100 tattered apartments by the time he was 16. And in 1963 he purchased a Black and White Zenith television set from Cardwell's Store, an establishment that sold ONLY televisions, that had a missing channel knob in order to save $3. His attempt to fashion a knob from the top of an old pot failed despite the fact that he had earn a BS degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Virginia following his rather dangerous WWII stint in the Navy --perhaps if he had studies Mechanical Engineering things would have turn out differently. We will never know. However, once his first redesign had fallen short we simply resorted to a pair of pliers. I remember they had a blue rubber handle. Over the next five years those pliers were a crucial object of my daily life. The larger world's entree into our tiny living room required them. Johnny Quest and Space Ghost needed them in order to save the world and other planets. Then, after the forces of embarrassing social pressure (and the wailing and gnashing of our ever mutating teeth) my father caved in and bought our first color set (which was, of course, equivalent for us kids to having won 10 Zillion dollars from some prize contest in The Lady's Home Journal). To this day I have a fondness for pliers, the U.S. Navy, saved planets, and North Jersey.

What is Space Ghost drinking?

Ours were not actually this nice