The Minnesota Farm Woman

A dear friend told me recently that she once climbed up on the roof of her trailer to move the TV antenna just right so she could watch Elvis in his Live From Las Vegas show. In these ultra-modern times of satellites, digital cable, and watching TV or movies on our iPads we often forget how it used to be.  At our house, we have satellite TV and a choice of 150 channels and still often complain that there’s nothing to watch. I grew up in the 1960’s and 1970’s in a small town, where we got two TV channels, CBS and NBC. The “newer” station called ABC came in only occasionally at our house, if all the planets were aligned and there were no clouds in the sky, and if you stood on one leg while holding the rabbit ears with your left hand.  In the late 1960’s we had our own version of today’s popular  Twilight vampire series, a daily gothic soap opera called Dark Shadows.  EVERYONE was talking about it. EVERYONE was watching it.  Everyone except me. My dad wouldn’t spring for a bigger TV antenna and thought that two channels were more than enough for anyone and besides, we should be doing our homework after school instead of watching vampires, however frightfully handsome they may be.  I learned that if I covered the rabbit ears with tinfoil and clipped a clothes pin to one side, I could get a  snowy glimpse of Barnabas Collins and Victoria Winters on the screen, and I only had to jiggle the clothes pin every once in a while.  I think that Dark Shadows started out as black and white, but by the early 1970’s changed to color programming. It wouldn’t have mattered at our house any more than having more than two channels did.   We were probably the last house on the block to get a color TV. We also didn’t have a remote. Can you imagine actually GETTING UP to change the channel? It really wasn’t that hard with only 2 1/2 channels to choose from, unless you had to turn the horizontal or vertical buttons, which sometimes stopped the lines from coming across the picture.  Funny how those lines always came back once you sat down.  Kids didn’t get to choose the channels much anyway, because we didn’t get to watch a lot of TV except for Saturday mornings, when it was all ours. I remember liking the more adventurous stuff like Sky King and Johnny Quest along with my favorite, The Monkees.   My sister’s favorite was a large furry creature called H. R. Pufnstuf, with an inane theme song that I could probably sing word for word today.  Even though Elvis has left the building, so to speak, you can find him on YouTube or Hulu along with H.R., The Monkees, and all of our old favorites.  Best of all, I hear that there will be a Dark Shadows movie coming out soon. In living color. I may not be into vampires any more, but I am into nostalgia……and Johnny Depp.