Things my Kids Will Never Experience (Part One)

Televisions with knobs that turn

My grandparents had a big ol' Zenith console television in a fake wood grain cabinet. It dominated it's corner of the living room and exuded an aura of authority and dominion that felt somehow prehistoric, as if the house had been built around it as a shrine. There was no such thing as a remote back in the days when we'd all gather around to eat dinner off folding trays while watching Hee Haw and The Osmond's (Grandparent's version of MTV back then). You had to get up off your chair, walk over to the TV, bend down, and turn a knob.

There were two knobs on Grandma and Grandpa's Zenith. Both of them were identical looking. The top one turned between the standard stations, channels one through twenty-four (the knob operated a clever little mechanism that shuttled a series of numbers behind a little, backlit window, telling you what station you were currently viewing). The lower knob was designed for that mystical land of Cable TV (back then only grandparents were allowed to have cable, on the assumption that anyone under 65 had better things to do on a Saturday afternoon than watch twenty year old B-movies and local call-in quiz shows). The lower knob turned in tiny, clicking increments between the multitude frequencies that cable TV operated on back in the day.

My kids will never know what turning the knob felt like. The knob was made of some kind of fake-metal-wonder-plastic with a chipped, chrome look. The one on Grandma and Grandpa's Zenith was a cylinder about the shape of short stack of poker chips. It had a knurled edge around the outside and a flat, thumb-smeared plate sticking out of it's front. The plate fit perfectly between your thumb and curled fore-finger and gave necessary leverage. When you turned it, there was a moment of resistance as you overcame some clockwork mechanism inside- the screen would go fuzzy as you steered the tuner out of one channel into unknown territory - then the resistance vanished and the knob turned easily, shortly, clicking over one cog and plunking into a new channel with a satisfying little thud of completion. You'd look to see what was on the screen, then turn again as needed until you found something that looked promising.

And then, if you were Grandma or Grandpa, you adopted the wait-and-see pose: hands high on the hips, bent over almost double at the waist, face set in the expression of an umpire waiting for a pitch on a full count. The wait-and-see pose was necessary, because choosing a channel was a commitment. When you walked back to your chair and sat down, you were established; there was no turning back. You were gonna watch that damn channel no matter what.

The wait-and-see pose was generally man's work.

Us kids never adopted the wait-and-see pose. We eliminated the middle-man by simply sitting on the floor within two feet of the knob, turning channels sometimes just for the fun of it. Turning channels meant control. Turning channels meant POWER.

When my kids grow up, the phrase "Don't touch that dial" will mean as much to them as "Don't count your eggs before they're hatched" means to me. ("Hatched"? Who hatches eggs? I thought a hatch was what you put a rabbit in or something?) Today, we zap through a hundred channels in thirty seconds flat, all from the comfort of the couch, moving nothing more than a few insignificant finger muscles and even fewer insignificant brain cells. And it's good. I like my remote these days. If I lose my remote, I am suddenly utterly helpless, sitting on the edge of the couch and staring at the TV like a rabbit on the highway, frozen in the doomsday glare of (gasp!) a random commercial! But I like remembering the feeling of the knob. I like remembering what it was like to commit to a night's TV on one channel, come hell or high water (or a three minute commercial for Slim Whitman records). I like remembering the POWER of The Knob.

Remotes don't mean power any more than more channels mean better things to watch.