Books I Have Loved

Title: The Open Gate
Author: Kate Seredy
First Read: Rhode Island College library
When: 1975 or thereabouts

My favorite place at RIC was a little carrel upstairs on the second floor wedged in between the metal stacks. I would go there to work on homework between classes, but soon noticed that the books that surrounded me were children's books, presumably for the education courses taken by future teachers. They appeared to be the usual collection of elementary-school library books, from Eleanor Estes to Sydney Taylor, until I came to a book I'd never heard of before, The Open Gate.

Now, I had met its author many years earlier at Stadium School, with her classic books The Good Master (a Newbery Award winner about young Kate, sent to live on the Hungarian plains) and The Singing Tree (the sequel, taking place during World War I; I was astonished when I realized Jancsi and Kate were the enemy because they were Hungarians, which, of course, is the whole point of the book, that behind all those armies are people who are alike all over). Even better, in junior high I had fallen in love with her Chestry Oak, the story of a wealthy Hungarian boy growing up under the specter of Nazism. The story of Prince Michael and the beautiful stallion Midnight resonates in me still today.

But this book...oh, what a lovely, funny, inspiring book. It's the story of the Preston family: father John, mother Molly, 12-year-old Dick, and 8-year-old Janet, plus John's mother, "Gran," who live in a New York apartment. The family enjoys their comfortable life, but Gran is bored and irritated by modern appliances and machinery. John is fired from his ad agency position in favor of his boss' son-in-law, and the family heads off to a lake resort to relax a bit before he takes up job-hunting duties. In a series of events instigated by Gran, John ends up buying a rundown farm, and when he realizes it, intends to sell it. But Gran wishes to stay there with "a stove that takes orders from the cook and not the other way around" because she was born on a farm and misses the life, and the kids want to stick around to see what happens. Gradually the whole family comes to love the hard work of farm life, and make fast friends, including the Van Keurans, an elderly couple raising their grandson, and Mike Mogor, a Polish immigrant.

Seredy has always glorified country living, from the big Nagy estate of Good Master and Singing Tree, to the small American farmer in Chestry Oak. But Open Gate distills this all in a big beautiful lovefest with rural living: the father who accepts hard physical work after positions in offices all his life, the mother who didn't want to help an aunt with the canning and ends up doing it all herself (and gets over fears of livestock), the two kids who bloom not just physically but in fellowship with young Andy Van Keuran. You sit there and marvel at Gran doing the cooking in a woodstove, John digging postholes, Molly redoing the furniture, the children taking care of chickens, cows, and chores that sound hard, hard, hard, but they are so happy at their fate you want to pack up and move to a farm and do without modern conveniences, too!

The book takes you and wraps you in warm, homey family values from the first chapters on the farm to the last. Andy's secret talent brings a very special reward to his family, Dick and Janet learn hard work and neighborliness bring great emotional satisfaction, Gran and Molly make a warm and welcoming home for all, and John discovers that working for himself is the best reward of life. Suppers around the wood stove, a Christmas tree with candles, being present at the birth of a calf, a ride home from an auction in a surrey on a summer night—it all insulates so well than when the crisis comes along, you know the family can weather the coming storm.

Yeah, it's old fashioned and slightly jingoistic, but by love of them all I am drawn into their family and we are all one.

Mom's "Stories"

One of the things that's happened over on RetroTV these days (besides reruns of classic Doctor Who and my personal hobbyhorse, Doctor Simon Locke) is that they're showing the old NBC serial drama The Doctors, right now from 1968.

Mom started out watching the classic CBS soap operas, the ones that came over from radio, with portentous titles like Search for Tomorrow, The Secret Storm, The Guiding Light (which started life as a religious serial), and The Edge of Night (which started out as a serial version of Perry Mason), all fifteen minutes in length like their radio antecedents. Life's rude indignities, like cheating spouses, miscarriages, infertility, and sudden illness, were all punctuated with the chords of organ music, hallmark of the daytime soaps. This was the soundtrack to the afternoon of the years before kindergarten, although I paid little attention; better the stuffed animals, the blocks, and the little books than the perpetually dismal people on afternoon television.

Somewhere in the early 1960s Mom switched allegiances to NBC. The regular schedule took a bit to shake out, but eventually it became Days of Our Lives at 2 p.m., followed by The Doctors, with Another World at three, and Return to Peyton Place at 3:30, finishing off with the AW spinoff Somerset. Days I mainly recall for the venerable leads of the Horton clan, the mellifluous McDonald Carey as Tom Horton Senior and Frances Reid as his wife Alice, Somerset because they had spun off Sam and Lahoma (Jordan Charney and Ann Wedgeworth) from Another World. I retained an interest in Return to Peyton Place for the two years it was on because (1) Guy Stockwell, who played Dr. Rossi, was a real fox back then and (2) I wanted John Levin, who played little Matthew Carson, for a little brother. (He was adorable.)

Another World was Mom's favorite as well as my particular addiction for a while, and Michael M. Ryan was my guy. He played attorney John Randolph, who defended young Patricia Matthews against a murder charge and then later married her. In the usual soap opera-y way of things, crises happened. (The cast also featured a young guy named Sam Groom who played Pat's youngest sibling, who went on to—what else?—Doctor Simon Locke.) I finally had to wean myself off it because I was getting too involved in the storylines. They killed poor John off not long after that.

The Doctors was a series I remember chiefly for Gerald Gordon's portrayal of brilliant but hotheaded surgeon Dr. Nick Bellini and the quite wisdom of Hope Memorial Hospital's chief of staff, Dr. Matt Powers, played by the dependable James Pritchett. It's been a total gas watching the series again. I don't watch soap operas any longer, but I leave NBC on for Snowy (and did for Schuyler before him) and have run into the modernities of Days of Our Lives over the years. The first thing that strikes me about The Doctors is that it's populated by real adults. When I watch Days it seems everyone is in their 20s and early 30s and rippingly gorgeous, the women with long flowing hair, pouty lips, highly-mascara'd eyes, and superb figures, the guys fashionably youthful with bristling beards and six-pack chests. Oh, there are a few older folks like Stefano (?) still around, but most of them look like they're one step from having graduated from Glamorous University.

The sets are oh-so-tiny compared to the vast McMansion sets of today! There's the doctors' lounge, the nurses' station, the lab (which features an endlessly bubbling tall beaker of a yellow solution and a couple of other retorts and pipettes full of colored liquids, just so you know it's a lab, you see, which is in question because they keep geraniums in the window!), and several rooms that seem to do much duty as many different homes and apartments. And I'd really forgotten how funny the show could be: a recent story featured a long-haired guy named Jody who is a janitor at Hope Memorial Hospital, but who aspires to be an orderly and study medicine. Dr. Powers tells him he can have the orderly job if he cuts his hair, and half of one episode featured a hilarious sequence where Jody's friend Liz, Nurse Simpson, and the hospital barber all conspire to get him a haircut. Yet another continuing storyline has Doctors Nick Bellini—our brilliant surgeon with a hair-trigger temper, but a good heart, and Mom's favorite character—and Althea Davis—a mother as well as a doctor—getting engaged, and Althea's pre-teen, romantic daughter from a previous marriage, Penny, happily organizing a big wedding for them that neither want. While Nick and Althea are madly trying to figure out why the heck wedding organizers and newspaper social editors are calling them, Martha the laboratory technician keeps finding them canoodling in the lab.

Oh, yeah, there's the usual soap plots that kept everyone coming back in the 60s: the paralyzed woman who's afraid to walk after surgery, Maggie Powers believing her husband has made a fellow doctor pregnant, the fellow doctor entering into a loveless marriage (at least at her end) with the father of her child to keep her job and "give the baby a name," young Mike Powers' trying to make it as an intern at his father's hospital, and more. But there's a lot less sturm-und-drang and a lot more situations where you can actually get to know these folks and have some fun through the suds.

That Darn Spot (a.k.a. The Neverending Story)

Mom was a neat freak. There was no doubt about it. Once she went to work little things had to fall by the wayside, like dusting the house each morning, but before that time everything had a feather duster run over it daily. I dreaded weekends because one of my chores was having to take everything off the bureaus and the parlor tables and use a cloth (and sometimes the Pledge); between the bureau scarves, the small gold-framed photos, the knicknacks, clocks, flowers, and of course the saint statues it was a long and tedious job.

(Dad always liked to tell the story about their bedroom. Just as at our house, so it was at my maternal grandparents' house where Mom and Dad lived for four years, saving up to "go housekeeping." As in many Catholic homes, the top of the chest of drawers was lined with religious statues: the Infant of Prague, the Sacret Heart of Jesus, the Blessed Mother. Plus there was a statue of St. Anthony on the bureau and of course a Crucifix over the bed. He used to say he felt downright guilty "doing what comes naturally" in front of Jesus!)

The house also had to be dustmopped daily (thank goodness for hardwood floors!), the parlor vacuumed, the dishes washed and wiped. If doing the dishes or making the beds on a morning we were going downtown might make us miss the bus, we missed the bus! Mother never left a dish unwashed or a bed unmade. I learned to make a bed in two minutes and forty seconds, and that was with the top sheet and blanket tucked in, the bedspread correctly positioned and flat, and the pillows puffed up into long bolsters at the top of the bed with the spread covering it like frosting on a Swiss roll. Plus there was the laundry to be done, and the ironing after that. Mother ironed everything. About the time I got old enough to iron, she had given up ironing panties, men's shorts, and the sheets, but the pillowcases had to be ironed! And not only did I have to iron my pants, but they had to have a crease in them, like Dad's trousers (even the ones he wore to work in the factory every day). No one was ever going to gossip about my Mom's house- and family-keeping!

Back in those days I would spend any time not watching television in the living room in my bedroom, sitting cross-legged on the bed. I had "Lassie," my little 12-inch television set in the window, for some time, then shifted into the corner about the time I went to work and bought my nice wooden art desk, which, of course, became a horizontal magnet, and I seldom used it. Instead I would sit "tailor-fashion" with the beanbag lap desk someone had bought me on my lap, with my pens in their containers and my crayon box on either side of me, and a composition book in front of me, writing stories.

I couldn't write stories in just any old way, on a tablet like John-Boy or Laura Ingalls Wilder. Instead, I bought spiral bound small college-ruled notebooks, first at my favorite drugstore of all time, Thall's Pharmacy on Reservoir Avenue, and then later at Douglas Drugs on Atwood Avenue. (Both of these places fall under Places I Still Miss: Thall's which had TV Guide earlier than anyone else, a big plus when the Fall Preview came out, and Douglas Drugs, where I bought my first copy of "Starlog.") These were written using the beautiful Sheaffer ballpoint cartridge pen Mom bought me when I went to Hugh B. Bain (pens were supplied in elementary school only), with embellishments provided by several sources, including every single color of Flair pen ever made and my "fountain" pen with the black ink (it wasn't a real fountain pen, which you fill from an inkwell, but a cartridge pen). Every so many pages I would illustrate a scene from the story, and then when I finished, two pages of the composition book were left blank. When I did finish, I bent one end of the wire spiral so that I could "unscrew" it, remove the two sheets, and then replace them on top of each of the cardboard covers. I could then make a cover for my book and a teaser for the story on the back, just like a proper novel, and tape the cover papers to the cardboard.

It was the fountain pen which caused all the trouble, because if a fountain pen has one weakness, it's that anything absorbent, like paper—and like cloth—will wick the ink from the nib of the pen if it is laid on that type of surface. So I was very careful, especially after an accident with an old blouse (and thank God it was old), never to leave the fountain pen lying with its point against paper or cloth. Besides, a big blot of ink on paper or cloth meant less ink in the cartridge, and those were expensive. It was in my best interest to be careful.

Nevertheless, one day Mom found a big black spot on one of my sheets. Yes, you can guess what she accused me of doing. In vain I protested that I never left the pen lying on the sheet, that if nothing else it wasted the ink. No, she insisted, it must have rolled away and you didn't see it...there's nothing else that could have made a big black spot like that...on and on. And on and on. And it didn't go away after a week, or a couple of weeks. Every time we changed the beds and the blotted sheet came up, she shook her head at my wastefulness, and I protested that it wasn't my pen..."well, then it was another one of your pens!" was the retort. If something else went wrong and I would protest that it wasn't my fault, she would bring up the ink spot on the sheet. I would never, ever, hear the end of that sheet.

Over the course of another couple of years, tiny black spots appeared on some clothing. Once it was Dad's pants, so Mom figured it was something he had gotten into at work. Polishing jewelry was never a clean job and Dad had to scrub his fingertips with a nail brush when he finished for the day. Once it was on the pocket of my chestnut-colored pants and again came the accusation about the fountain pen. The fact that I usually sat on the bed to write after I'd changed clothes for the night and was in my pajamas didn't appear to dawn on Mom. It was all the fault of that fountain pen! I sewed a cute little bee patch on the pocket and hoped that was the end of it.

So victory was very sweet the day a big black spot showed up on Mom's sheets, and not only one of hers, but on the bottom sheet, which spent 16 hours a day covered up with a flat sheet, a couple of blankets, and a spread, none of which had an ink spot on it. And she knew very well I almost never went into their bedroom, and no one could sit on that bed without making a racket; it had bed springs instead of a box spring and they squeaked like the devil.

Mom was positively gobsmacked. Me, I gloated. "I guess you think I deliberately set my fountain pen down on your bed, right?"

So she called my cousin Timmy, who was a washer repairman. He reported that the clutch was bad on the washer and that would make it, occasionally, leak oil into the tub—which meant that big "ink stain" on my sheets was an oil stain instead.

Needless to say I was pretty happy, having finally vanquished the specter of the leaking fountain pen.

Don't you know that as Mom got older she started telling that old story again? Apparently, some family legends never die...

"I Say It's Spinach..."

Otherwise known as "the Mom story" and always worth repeating at this time of year.

I don't think I fall into the "picky eater" category, but I do have a list of foods I don't like. Cooked green vegetables are at the top. I'll eat salad veggies any day, but boil those suckers and turn 'em limp and you insult my digestion.

In any case, I tell people I was the only kid in school who hated weekends. Religiously obeying my pediatrician, Mom fed me the three foods I hated most in the world on Friday and Saturday (always those days because my dad loved routine and we ate the same kind of food on the same day of the week all the time).

Friday night was fish. Now, I'm not totally adverse to fish. Shellfish make me swoon. Crab I'll eat until I'm stuffed. I love steamers, clam chowder, scallops broiled in butter, shrimp scampi, the rare bit of lobster (I was 54 before I ate my first lobster roll—that stuff is just too expensive!), and tuna fish. I've even been known to eat a few bites of salmon steak if it's been cooked nicely and has a fruity sauce upon it to kill the fish taste. But I hate your run-of-the-mill freshwater and especially saltwater fish. Mom bought what she could afford at the little cinderblock fish market once on Park Avenue, and this usually ended up being haddock or halibut. Worse, the only way my parents would eat fish was breaded and fried. I hate foods with coatings, whether it's battered or bread crumbed: fried chicken, chicken fried steak, fried appetizers, etc. When I eat a food, I want to taste the food, not this noxious grainy coating that too often has that even more noxious condiment, pepper, in it. (The one exception to this rule is onion rings.)

I'd sit there on Friday nights and try to pick the middle out of the breaded fish, but Mom had always breaded 'em too well. The bread crumbs were well mixed into the flaky fish flesh and I'd end up disgustedly digesting fishy flesh and flaky fried bits.

Saturday afternoon was scrambled eggs. Remember, this was the 1960s, back in the days when no one worried about cholesterol and eggs were "good for you." You were supposed to eat one or two every day.

As far as I'm concerned, eggs belong in cake batters. Mom got around this dislike by having me drink an eggnog every morning. This was also back in the days when no one made a fuss about salmonella in chicken eggs—we got our eggs fresh from Stamps Farm out on Scituate Avenue, where you could hear the chickens from where you stood buying the eggs—and she could make me a real eggnog, not those gloppy, thick, oversweetened concoctions that show up in cans and bottles before Christmas. She beat one egg, one cup of whole milk, and a teaspoon of sugar, and I drank the delicious beverage without a quibble. On frigid winter mornings when the thermometer barely rose to double digits, totally supported by the same pediatrician mentioned earlier, she would put a tablespoonful of brandy into it—can you imagine a doctor recommending this today for an elementary school kid? My pediatrician did; in fact when Mom told him about the brandy and the amount, he teased her: "Cheapskate!"

Now, granted, if you have to eat an egg, scrambled is the way to go. But even that she got down me only forkful by desperate forkful for Saturday lunch.

Saturday supper was the worst. If the spinach I had to eat wasn't bad enough, she cooked it Italian style. This mean you sauteed the wretched stuff in olive oil until it was limp and saturated with this greasy warm coating. Even with the oil poured off it was slimy and nasty. But this was the way she had been brought up to cook spinach and the way my dad enjoyed it.

(Many years later I figured it might have been the oil that I hated, not the spinach, so one day when a salad bar was offering spinach salad, I gave it a try. No dice. As far as I'm concerned, the taste of spinach is as bad as sucking on the monkey bars in the schoolyard.)

Anyway, I ate this wretched concoction for years, through three schools, several best friends, three presidencies, hippies, Vietnam, changing mores on TV, bellbottom pants, the maxi skirt, the decline of Downtown Providence—you get the idea. (Cue nostalgic film montage...)

One Saturday evening when I had just turned seventeen I was sitting at the table. Mom had just started to get the utensils out for dinner and I was considering setting the table; it was a little early but I might as well get it over with. And we were talking.

She took out the smallest, tiniest saucepan she used for the spinach (and boiling water for tea) and I said, "You know what? I can't wait until I turn eighteen."

She laughed. "Are you going to go out on your own and leave us?"

My parents and I got along very well 99 percent of the time and I shook my head. "Of course not. But at eighteen I'll be an adult and be able to make some of my own decisions." Now, mind you, I tried not to swear in front of my mother. Like Ralphie from A Christmas Story I still lived in everlasting dread of getting my mouth washed out with soap. But I had to make my point. "And then I won't ever have to eat that goddamned spinach ever again."

She put the saucepan down and blinked at me, not even scolding me for "that word." "You really don't like it that much?"

Heavens, parents can be so dense sometimes. "I hate it, Mom. It tastes awful and greasy and nasty and it makes me sick to the stomach."

At that time I took vitamin supplements. So she sighed and said, "Well, you're healthy enough. Okay, you don't have to eat it anymore."

If I wasn't flabbergasted enough by that, she added, "Good, then I won't have to eat it any more either. I hate spinach."

Blink. "You what?"

"I hate spinach. I've always hated it, but the doctor said it was good for you, so I ate it, too, to show you a good example."

My mother ate something she hated for sixteen years every Saturday night just to show me a good example.

If that ain't Mother Love, I don't know what is.

Reprint: "Adventures in Analog"

In honor of recent antenna adventures, a June 2009 tribute to the end of the analog television era:

Most people my age say "childhood television" and remember a big brown wooden box. It was considered a piece of furniture, just like the big freestanding radio sets that came before it, and much care was taken in not only choosing the model of television, but the finish: light wood to match oak or birch furniture, darker to match walnut or maple.

Our earliest set, which I remember only because it sat in the basement for several years before Dad hollowed it out to make shelving units, was an Andrea television/radio unit, small screen to the left, radio with sliding tuning bar at the right. The actual set of my youth was a big dark-brown General Electric, topped by a pair of Bakelite-based "rabbit ears." It was parked next to the stairway to the attic and in later years a thick double-line of antenna cable ran down the stairs from the attic to connect to it, with the antenna mounted on the chimney. The top half of the television cabinet was the screen, and the bottom half, covered by some roughly woven material with gold thread highlights, was the speaker. Directly under the screen was a narrow horizontal panel with one large knob covered with numbers from 2 to 13 (the tuner), and smaller brown Bakelite buttons, one to turn the monster on and off, the other two for the vertical and horizontal holds. Parents of toddlers and small children often removed the knobs and either just put them on at night when everyone was watching, or left a pliers on top of the television to change the channels (invariably if you took the knobs off they got lost and you ended up doing this anyway) via the metal knob-mount.

(Here's a 1950s GE, but it has knobs to one side of the screen, not underneath. Otherwise our TV looked a lot like this one.)

Today you just switch on the television (and the cable or satellite box) and there's nothing left to do, unless you still operate with rabbit ears. Back then getting a picture might involve a complicated process. First you had to get up to turn the knob to the proper channel. Remote controls existed back then, but most had long cords to attach them to the television--something called "infra-red" remotes were around, but they were all, corded or not, hideously expensive. For middle and lower class folks, there was an alternative remote control: it was called a child.

Even when clicked to the proper channel, you might have to mess with the white or clear plastic "fine tuner" that surrounded the tuner knob. You turned it one way or the other to find the best picture. Fine-tuning frequently also involved turning the rabbit ears, extending or compressing one of the aerials, putting one up and one down, pointing them at different angles, etc., until the picture was clear. Until then, you got various degrees of "snow" (those fine particles that told you the station signal was going out of range) and skew. Occasionally the picture wouldn't stay adjusted unless you stood there at a weird angle, holding the little round ball at the tip of the antenna. If you wanted to see the program badly enough, there you stayed. Sometimes aluminum foil on the tips helped.

Invariably, either when you'd just gotten comfortable in your chair or on the sofa with some knitting or had a custard cup of ice cream in your hand, an airplane would fly over and the picture would start to roll vertically. Eventually you would have to put whatever down and mess with the vertical tuning knob. You would nudge it minimally one way or the other until the picture stopped rolling, sit down, pick up the knitting...at which point the effects of the airplane that just flew over dissipated and the picture started rolling again. Aieeee!

Only occasionally did horizontal hold button manipulation become necessary...the picture was much more likely to roll than skew sideways into jagged-edge lightning bolts, so that the screen looked as if someone on drugs was viewing it.

Both vertical roll and horizontal skew happened along with the snow when you were getting out of range of a station. Invariably this led to an upgrade of antenna. The rabbit ears on the top of the big box were exchanged for a spiky metal antenna on the roof. They came in small sizes for people who just wanted local stations, and huge outfits called "fringe antennas" that got reception for those out in the country. The antenna wire was a pair of copper leads wrapped in a flexible dark brown rubbery casing. To put the antenna on the television, there was none of this screwing in a cable nonsense. You pulled the television away from the wall and found the two small screws that were the antenna connectors. Then you took a small knife (paring knives were best) and made a slit in the rubber between the two wires as far down as you needed. Then on the tips of the two ends you now had, you slit into them gently until you exposed bare copper wire on each (it was easier if you twisted the wire as you took the rubber off, so it was neat, but you had to be careful not to break the strands) until you had enough wire exposed to wrap around the screws. (You could attach the wires to little hooks and then put the hooks around the screws, but most people just did the wire-to-screw maneuver.) If you could put on an antenna wire without cutting a finger, you had mastered it. I mastered the maneuver at twelve.

Tuning in that much-desired outdoor aerial—ohboy, more channels!—for the very first time was another trip. It invariably involved dad up on the roof, yelling down to a child on the lawn or the driveway, "Ask your mother if it's okay." Child would run to the door or the window: "Dad wants to know if it's okay." "We're getting Channel 12, but not Channel 10." Child stepped back some feet to relay this info to dad. Dad would twitch the antenna a few degrees to the right or left. "How about now?" Child returned to door or window. "How about now?" "We're getting 10 and 12, but not 6." Back went the child: "Mom says we're getting 10 and 12, but not 6." Twist. "How about now..." Always there was one channel, often the one with mom's favorite series or dad's favorite sports broadcast, whose broadcast tower was on a 90-degree angle from all the other stations. You either put up with the fuzzy picture in order to get a brilliant picture on the other ten channels, or you finally gave up and invested in an antenna rotor, which motorized the aerial and was controlled by a box on the television with a big knob that pointed to all directions on the compass. When it moved the knob lit up and the gadget let out a god-awful thumping noise which led to the instruction "bump that thing over to Channel 6, will ya?" and then later "bump it back to Channel 10."

The back of one of these old televisions were almost as interesting as the front. The rear was covered with some sort of thick, unbendable board that was rough-woven like fine burlap on one side and smooth on the other. There were evenly-spaced holes in it so the heat from inside the television could vent. The rear of the big picture tube stuck out of the middle of this board, covered by some dark hard plastic. If you undid the screws in each corner, you could take the backing off the television and see its innards: not circuit board like today, but rows of little tubes that looked like elongated light bulbs marching in short columns. If you were semi-knowledgable in electronics and something went wrong with the television, you could take out the appropriate tube and bring it to any hardware store, where they had racks of little replacement tubes. Failing that, it was a call to the television repairman. Back then there was one on almost every streetcorner.

Mid-1960s televisions had something called "the red button" (nice technical term!) in the rear. Pressing the red button was something reserved for catastrophe. If you turned on the television and the sound or picture, or sometimes both, didn't appear, you pressed the red button. It was some type of reset button, not unlike rebooting the computer today when Windows locks up, and often it worked. Of course (go figure), the repair we did most often on our annoying Magnavox (successor to the GE) was repair of the red button itself, which shorted out at inopportune times.

In the early 1960s, the Federal Communications Commission passed a ruling that all new televisions had to have a UHF tuner (channels 14 through 83) along with the VHF one (2-13). (There never was a "Channel 1." The frequencies contained within it were used for police radios.) So when we junked the beloved GE in 1964 (Dad took the innards out of that one, too, making Mom some shelving near the washing machine to hold her detergents) and got the Magnavox I always hated, we gained a UHF dial. This one operated differently than the VHF dial, in that, instead of clicking from channel to channel, it turned freely, leaving you to tune in various channels by minute manipulation of the knob. It was common while watching a UHF station for a long period of time to have the channel "slip" and you had to go back to the tuner and feather-flick it to get it back on signal.

Everything interfered with television pictures in those days, whether you were on rabbit ears or outside aerial. If Mom was using the blender or Dad the drill you would see a horizontal line or dots running across the screen. Sometimes even the sound would hum. If the guy next door was using a big electric drill to do some woodworking, you might get the same effect, if a bit fainter. When airplanes flew over the picture faded in and out and shimmied for several seconds. For a long time we received police calls on one of the channels, over the soundtrack of whatever program was on.

If two channels were close to each other, like Channels 36 and 38, the stronger of the two channels might cause "ghosting" on the weaker one. You would see an off-framed faint image of the stronger channel superimposed on the picture you were watching. In certain weather, you might not even be able to make out the weaker station for this "ghost."

The neatest phenomenon was something called a "skip image." The television signals, sown over a large area, would hit reflective areas in the atmosphere (ionosphere?) and "skip," often to areas way beyond their intended range. This began with AM radio, and it wasn't surprising during certain atmospheric conditions (like snowstorms) to be able to hear Chicago radio stations in New England. (On one memorable occasion Dad turned on the car radio at 9 p.m. during our vacation in Williamsburg, VA, and was receiving WBZ from Boston.) But skip images on television were less common and it was always a cool thing when you got them. We were too far out of range of the CBS station in Hartford, CT, to regularly watch it, but one memorable summer Saturday evening I managed to watch an entire episode of Mannix, which was being pre-empted on the Providence and Boston stations (naturally it was the second part of a two-part story), via the Hartford channel on a much-welcome skip. The coolest one was on the morning of a snowstorm when I made out some twisted, fuzzy, soundless images of The Phil Donohue Show on Channel 3. No station in the New England area showed Donohue at that time and I was surprised as all get-out when for mere seconds a station logo came up out of the static-clotted television screen for a Miami, FL, station!

It was actually possible to wake up in those days to nothing on television. Nowadays stations just stay on all night, filling hours with programs shilling for useless exercise items, appliances, and geegaws. Back then TV stations came on in the morning. First there would be snow, then the infamous test pattern. In the black-and-white era you might get lucky and see the famous Indian head test pattern. Many stations had their own test patterns, with their own logo and a photo of a station personality. Then usually a man would announce the beginning of the station's broadcast day. He might use their call letters, even their frequency, and state the station's ownership. Next you might have a prayer and/or the National Anthem, before seguing into a farm report, early news, a children's program. At night the reverse happened: after the last credits of the last program rolled, you had the national anthem played over some film of a flag flapping the breeze, and the announcer intoning "This ends our broadcast day." The station usually signed off with a high-pitched hum that made you hastily turn the sound down before it went to noisy snow.

Today that all passes forever. Now more than ever, you sit in a chair and grab something about the size of a deck of cards, but twice as long. You press a button. The television comes on and you watch in comfort. If the program coming up isn't a favorite, you use the remote control to change the channel. Even the folks left with dials and buttons will have to use the remote to access their converter boxes. No skip images, no ghosting, no snow, no electrical interference, no rolling, no skew. Kids will never know the trouble we had tuning in the beast...

...or all the fun.

"This ends our analog broadcast  day era." (June 12, 2009)

Seen: Red Geraniums

There they were in front of Kroger this morning, flanking other multicolored potted plants. Geraniums are not my favorite flowers; I dislike the musty, unattractive scent. But red geraniums and May always bring back the particular memory of Mother's Day and St. Ann's Cemetery.

With our factory income there weren't many spare dollars for flowers for the cemetery. I would have preferred the waving tulips or fragrant hyacinths in springtime, or the lilies that predominated the rest of the year, but the bright little geraniums were the least expensive of the potted flowers that were sold near the cemetery gate or at the garden stands at the "mill outlets." Dad or Mom made the careful selection of three geraniums after counting out creased and folded dollar bills to the proprietor. On Mother's Day, still all dressed in patent leather pumps and spring-colored dress from Easter, fresh out of church and joining the line headed through the gates, I sat in the back seat with the three terra-cotta pots covered with brightly colored shiny paper, a little row of scarlet or pink, as we made our way down the curved road.

Almost as soon as you entered, to your right were a sad little collection of tiny headstones with lambs or cherubs upon them. These were for the babies, and they almost always had soft flowers of white or pink bobbing next to them. Passing several more plots, brave on a sunny Sunday with blooms of all sorts—gladioli, lilies, tulips, hyacinths, roses, and more—and fluttering satin ribbons, we would stop at the right side of the road, choose a geranium, and walk the few steps to Grandma Lanzi's grave. Dad's face always got soft and sober when we approached and he would kiss her picture gently before we stopped to pray. I have no memory of her; she died when I was three; the only thing I do recall is that we had a small Christmas tree that year, set on the big parlor table, rather than a large one, and only turned the lights on Christmas Eve. There were faucets on each corner of each plot, and if the geranium was too dry we would water it before setting it down under the headstone.

Even though it was Mother's Day, we had a potted geranium for Mother's brother, my Uncle Ernest, whose real name was Agnello. We always brought flowers for him, no matter what the holiday. He had not a tall headstone but a small rectangular stone set in the ground, like the rest of the graves in the plot across the street, and Mom kept track of where it was by row number and its distance from a certain tree at the edge of the plot. I have no memories of him, only that he was the adopted father of my cousin Raymond who lived in California. Still, you could see the empty space in the family right there in Mom's face. She would tell me rollicking stories of her girlhood when Uncle Ernie apparently had an old jalopy of a car in which Mom and her brothers would pile in to go places. Several times they drove straight to New York to see the Yankees play; I marvel even now—straight to New York, before the interstates, before the Connecticut Turnpike! It must have taken hours, all for a ballgame, and they would come back tired but happy.

And finally there was the slow left turn that brought us abreast of Grandma and Grandpa D'Ambra's headstone, where Mom lingered. Like me, she was very close to her mother; in her last few days she even called for her when in pain. With a little brush from the car she would sweep any bits of grass or dirt which had gotten on the rim of the stone from lawn cutting, and with spit she would clean the glass over the picture of her parents. I remember their little house on Killingly Street; Mom had no car so we would take the bus to Hartford Avenue and then walk the rest of the way, past the Warwick Shoppers World and the other businesses. By the time I was old enough to remember them, Grandpa had gone blind. He had been a vibrant working man, having grown up on a farm and then become, among other things, a coal miner and an ironworker. Now he was blind from cataracts and I recall only a silent man on the sofa, listening to the television. Grandma was sickly by that time, but I remember her offering me cookies and milk. They were childhood sweethearts and died within a month of each other.

Around us spread marching lines of marble and stone, almost all with a colorful surround of flowers. Cars stopped, families poured out, women in spring hats or lace mantillas, little girls in poufy skirts like mine, men and boys in suits and ties, gathering in little knots to pay their respects. Ribbons from the hats might flutter, the children would fidget, mothers would send a child with a container to get some water. If you saw someone you knew, you waved hello in a gentle manner; like the library this was a place of silence.

But around you the trees rustled, the birds sang, the bees darted from flower to flower, and the red geraniums were like flags.