Yours may be big but mine is bigger......

So here we are in video heaven! Super bowl, olympics etc., all big and in HD. It’s like dying and going to heaven!

Our family's first TV was in 1952 and it was a Sylvania, a table model, and it cost $250. This was a fortune in those days. It was black and white, of course, and I watched Ed Wynn perform on that first night. TV was in its infancy and it was fantastic! I never considered it small at that point, it was great and I was warned not to sit too close because I’d ruin my eyes somehow. I saw the Queen’s Coronation as it was filmed, processed and flown to New York for immediate broadcast just a day late!

I bought a plastic screen a few years later, kind of a Winky Dink screen if you’re old enough to know who that was (a TV cartoon where you drew on a plastic sheet to fill in the needed parts of the cartoon so Winky could forge the river etc.). I put the screen across the set and it was sky blue on the top, sort of yellow in the middle and green on the bottom and it was cheap color TV!

My friend Mike had a giant Fresnel lens kind of very expensive devise to make the screen look bigger. It stood in a large metal stand holding this giant lens.

In 1957, Alan, an old friend, moved away but had in his new house a color TV console and the only show I saw was a western with blue sky, yellow middle and green grass that looked a lot like my $1 plastic sheet.

In 1963 I was working-part time at the department store and a man traded in his old TV on a new model (this was a popular gimic at the time). He was willing to sell it to me for the trade in value, $1 per inch. I paid him $21 and I got his 21” portable which was a 100 pound metal bodied table model with a handle on top! It was black and white of course and it was huge! I watched the Kennedy assassination on that set and it’s indelibly set in my mind.

I moved up to 24” some years later, and maybe even 26”.When we lived in Beverly, MA we bought a 26” on a special sale and I was so excited. It was huge! It was not until the 2000’s that I moved to 32” and it was 110 pounds!

A year and a half ago I moved into a flat screen at 50” and I was in heaven. It’s so big and I can read the screen without glasses. In HD, I can see everything!

I want a bigger one now. No one believes me at home, they think I’m kidding. I want one so big that I can melt into the screen. I want the wall TV that covers the wall.

Funny thing is, we’ve been working with others trying to find home for discarded TV’s. We started with our 26” model and moved onto a 32” and a 40” give away that happy new flat screen viewers have no idea how to get rid of. They work fine and we’re all guilty about wanting them gone. No one wants to admit to being just an overstuffed greed ball or an over privileged child but we want them to disappear.

My wife and I have found homes for a few. The dump wants money for getting rid of yours and most of us want to put them out on garbage day and hope someone takes it, which usually does happen.

We all want bigger and better! I do!

P.S. Thanks to all of you for sticking by me. Today is the one year anniversary of this blog! I can't believe it but 290 stories later I'm still here and so are you! We will continue until I simply run out of stuff to say or I simply cease to be. Happy anniversary to me and to you!