Year Ten - 1976

I am quickly falling behind in my goal to write one of these once a week. I am going to keep going though and hopefully I will find time to catch up and finish by the time December rolls around...


So, year ten! It was 1976, the bicentennial. Oh, how the country was in a big swell of patriotism and glory. I guess we were just coming off of that whole Nixon thing too. People had a lot of reasons to wave a flag and put up some red, white and blue! Kids seemed to be the easiest targets to get involved in the whole thing. I feel like I remember the whole school year leading up to the Forth of July was one long USA nostalgia campaign. Well, it was an event that was pretty innocuous and it made everyone happy. So there really did not seem to be any harm in the whole thing.

I was entering third grade at this point. Still at Anson Elementary School. My younger brothers were getting older and bigger. There was talk of possibly moving at some point. My mother had taken a job at JC Penney in their old location on Main Street in Marshalltown. She was an inventory clerk. I think that meant that she processed all of the new merchandise that came into the store and put price tags on it. It was a part-time job and she still was mostly in the home when us kids were there. Dad was not often left to take care of the kids on his own. Not that he couldn't....but he worked the main bread winning job....and he always seemed tired and reserved when he was at home.

I started my big television watching around this time. I got some gift money of around $50.00 and chose to get a 4" screen black and white camping version television for my bedroom. The thing looked like a cross between a short wave radio and a car battery. But, it had a little screen and could pick up all of the television stations with it's telescopic antenna. I loved it. I really really loved it!

Finally! I had a television in my own bedroom. I put it on a table right next to my bed and I would watch TV until I fell asleep. Usually, that meant that around midnight my dad would open my door and yell at me to "turn that damn thing off!". I could never figure out exactly why that bothered him so much. I imagined that the cost of the electricity must have been so expensive that he felt I was just wasting it running the TV in the dark while I slept. I never had the volume up so loud that it could be heard in any other room. I did not even really stay up much past ten o'clock. Today I think it was probably just an annoyance for him that I constantly defied his directions. But, anyway....I would watch everything I could. I quickly became a huge fan of almost every show. I started watching things like Saturday Night Live, Monty Python's Flying Circus, Charlie's Angels, Bionic Woman, Sonny & Cher, Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley......etc.


Things have not changed much. Today I still watch a whole lot of television. When I lived with my grandparents after high school, I found out that my grandfather also watched a whole lot of television. Usually by himself....and usually he would fall asleep watching television. That fact made me feel a whole lot closer to my grandfather....and seemed to explain a lot about why I did those things too....

And today, I still currently fall asleep with the television on in my room. Except now it is a 37" flat screen that is playing.....and I use a sleep timer to turn it off after an hour.