I was six or seven years old when televisions made it to our neighborhood in Lewisville, NC. It was too late for the television to own my soul. I had already given it to the fields and especially the deep dark woods that stretched all the way to Conrad’s Pond perched above the bottomland by the Yadkin River.
The picture is one of my mother by our first television in our Lewisville house at the corner of Styers Street and Shallowford Road. In those days Lewisville was a simple place. The school when I first went in 1955 still housed grades one through twelve and was within easy walking distance of our home. My first grade teacher, Ms. Conrad, was a cousin to my mother so I followed the rules and colored within the lines.
In fact we were surrounded with cousins and other relatives. My great grandmother, Millie Styers lived in a little house next door to us. Abe, her husband ran Styers Ferry across the Yadkin River. Millie's house was just behind the big house of one-armed uncle Joe Styers who had lost one arm in an accident at the Styers-Shore water-powered mill in Yadkin County. Just across Styers St. on the other corner of Shallowford road was uncle Joe’s daughter Jet Fix and her two sons, Tommy and Stevie.
There always seemed to be lots of kids to play with after school. We played tackle football in the Fix’s yard and baseball in our yard before the cedar, cherry, and plum trees got too big.
Lewisville was a safe place. We rode our bikes everywhere and sometimes even to school. It was a different time, parents believed teachers explicitly, Fund raising involved making potholders with loops and other crafts. There were no air conditioners in houses or schools. You ate what they put on your place at the cafeteria. The only pizza I had before college was Chef Boyardee pizza kit. There wasn’t much homework and the only audio visual aids we had were tiny film strip ls that seem to be so securely locked away that watching them made you think you were involved in a jail break. They copied things using mimeograph machines. The purple copies smelled of alcohol and felt a little funny. You could also have it out with a bully at the bike rack and not get suspended.
Into that world came black and white television. The first show that I remember watching was the Howdy Doody show. When invited, I would go over to the Fix’s house and watch it with Tommy and Stevie. The show that I enjoyed the most was Davy Crockett. It launched in the mid-fifties. Then in 1959 came Bonanza with the Cartwrights. There were other shows, the Ed Sullivan Show and Walt Disney Presents. The one thing on television that seemed to matter was Major League Baseball on Saturday afternoon. I can even remember the teachers bringing televisions into the classroom during important World Series games. There were other TV classics like the Lone Ranger, Sky King, Gunsmoke, Lassie, Rin Tin Tin, Cannonball, and Route 66. We got NBC from Winston-Salem, CBS from Greensboro, and ABC from Charlotte if the antenna was just right.
To me one of the most important shows became the Nightly News with David Brinkley and Chet Huntley. My mother often took a few minutes off work from her beauty shop to watch it with me. That along with reading both the Winston-Salem Journal and the evening Sentinel kept me well informed for a kid.
I read all the comic books and Tom Swift Books that I could get my hands on with our limited budget.
There was no Internet, and no one was enamored with talking on the rotary phones so we played a lot, went to school and church, and when we were old enough, we joined the Boy Scouts. There was a fair amount of fishing involved when the weather was warm and even sometimes when it was pretty chilly.
Once we got old enough for Boy Scouts, we were also old enough to go hunting which wasn’t a big deal in those days. Boy Scouts eventually took over my life before high school which was probably a good thing. There was plenty of camping, summer camps and even a last hurrah of a 20 mile hike on the Wilderness Road before I went off to military school at McCallie. Only after I came back from my first semester in 1963 at McCallie did we get a color television which I mostly remember as a portal into the political conventions of the day. The only television that I remember at McCallie was in the canteen. We could watch it for a few minutes after evening study hall. It was hard to get hooked with only fifteen minutes of TV.
It was a much simpler life in the fifties and early sixties. Doctors even made house calls but radical change came pretty quickly. As freshmen in college the fall of 1967, we wore sports coats and ties. That was pretty much over by second semester. Inadvertently, we learned by 1969, that our government did not always tell the truth. We also figured out that at least in Harvard, there was a lot of police hostility to college students privileged enough to go to Harvard.
We can remember fondly those times when only the newspaper delivered the news (we had no TVs in our college rooms) but there is no way to unconnect our society just a little so it is best to take control of our new over-connected lives. Start by figuring out the right technology to connect yourself to the world. While it is not as easy as walking to Beck's General Store for a loaf of bread or a can of biscuits in the fifties, it is not impossible even for those of us with several decades on us.
When you get your technology connection to the world right, there will be no more cable company sagas or worries about being embarrassed by the lack of technology in your house. The last thing you want to do is embarrass those grown children with rotary phone equivalent of an Internet conncection.
