Let’s make a deal!
We tend to spoil our grandchildren, and Jennie and I are no exception. But they already have a lot of stuff, so we decided to simplify things and give them cash. Granted, we still give them stuff, just not as much stuff. Birthdays and lost tooth episodes are when most of our grandsons’ cash accumulates. Last Saturday was Frankie’s seventh birthday so we presented him with fifty dollars. (His older brother got a hundred in September, but after all, he is older.) The look on his face was priceless—you’d think he hit the lotto!
Then came the options of what he would do with all this money. He quickly calculated that he now had a total of around $130. Lego®s? Trading cards? A baseball bat? A lizard? Violin lessons? NOT. Now Frankie is no dummy. He immediately asked how much money his brother Bracken had saved. Bracken had $180. That’s $310 he proudly announced. He turned to the entire family—Is that enough to buy a TV for our room? You probably could buy a good used flat screen for that kind of money, but by the look on my daughter-in-law’s face, this was not an option.
Frankie’s appeal got me thinking about my own childhood. I recall that my brother and I always had a TV in our room, going back as far as 1960 when I was six years old living on my parents’ walnut ranch in the Santa Clara Valley. We thought it was so cool to get up at 5:30 AM on a school morning and flip on the tube to watch shows like The Farm Journal and Kukla, Fran, and Ollie. I can still see the images of milking cows and black and white puppets.
When we moved to Capitola in 1962, the TV came with us. After-school shows like Dialing for Dollars were a staple, along with Tarzan movies and Let’s Make a Deal. I learned a lot watching Password and Dinah Shore. Saturday mornings were the best with shows like Sky King, The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin, The Jetsons, and my all-time favorite, The Adventures of Rocky, Bullwinkle, and Friends. When the Sunday paper came with all the programs for the week, we would check off the ones we planned to watch—Combat!, Bonanza, Gunsmoke, The Flintstones, and, if we stayed up late enough, The Ed Sullivan Show.
During those early Capitola years, our family owned and ran the Shoreline Motel on the Esplanade. We had TVs in all the rooms. It was an eclectic collection of cheap contraptions that were always drawing complaints from the customers. Hell, we only got two channels, eight and eleven, and who wants to watch TV in a motel room anyway? I remember lugging the bulky TVs from room to room, then trying to adjust the antenna to get reception. Aluminum foil usually did the trick. I think the used TVs cost around fifteen dollars each. Needless to say, we were regular customers of Ray’s TV Repair Service on 41st Avenue.
I still probably watch too much TV, although I confine my viewing to sports, news, and movie streaming. I’ve read the book, The Plug-In Drug, and I totally agree that our kids spend too many hours watching screens of all types. Virtual reality headsets are exceptionally alarming and dangerous for our developing youth. So, alas, I have to concede that my grandson’s idea of a TV in his room is probably best put to bed. Things are different now, even though the memories of “Fractured Fairy Tales” and “Boris and Natasha’ will live on endearingly in my past.
I’d like to add a footnote to this post…
November is Native American History Month. Since I wrote Five Hundred Moons, a historical novel about the Ohlone people, I need to acknowledge their past presence on the land we now call home. It was their home for a thousand years or more before the Europeans came.
I saw recently that the local Amah-Mutsun Tribe, under the leadership of Valentine Lopez, was successful in stopping a proposed quarry in a place south of Gilroy that the Ohlone have held sacred for millenniums. The land was acquired by the Peninsula Open Space Trust. The acreage is bigger than Golden Gate Park. I hope someday I will be able to walk the oak-studded, rolling hills, running creeks, and flowering meadows that will forever contain the spirit of the indigenous native people.
Photo of the boys by Buzz Anderson. Copyright 2024. All rights reserved.
All other photos copyrighted by their respective owners.
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Bob Curwen
Your columns are always entertaining & insightful . Growing up I was too hyper to sit & watch much TV but my younger brother, Tom, was called “TV Tom” because of his incessant watching & had all the shows & channels memorized.