On 'Laugh-In,' Dylan and a TV antenna trapped inside
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- January 25, 2020
- 893
The house in which I grew up had five floors, six if you count the curious appendage tucked beneath the roof, a pink-fiberglass cocoon that held, of all things, the TV antenna.
Yes, you read that right.
Instead of standing tall and free outside, where all of its brethren poked their wiry arms into the air, pulling down signals from the sky, ours was like the kid who never comes out to play, the one around whom cruel rumors floated.
“I hear he’s got two heads,” tongues would wag, “and that one of them’s got no eyes.”
“That’s nothing,” another voice would chime in. “His brain’s made of plastic. That’s what I heard. He’s like … an alien.”
Having the only indoor TV antenna on the block or, for that matter, the whole town wasn’t something we talked about in polite society.
It just wasn’t done.
But I always wondered about how the decision to locate it where it was came about, and the only thing that made any sense was the contractor just forgot about it.
It’s like when you’re putting together a hammock to surprise your wife on her birthday and, after three hours of sweaty exertion, you notice an extra strut that’s been hiding behind the recycle bin.
The best thing you can do at that point is pretend it doesn’t exist.
I spent an inordinate amount of time on the roof of our house, gamboling from level to level, straddling the eaves and taking the sun on the exposed southern front, transistor tucked in the gutter.
And so I know for a fact the guys who built that home could have easily placed the antenna up there, where it might actually have worked; instead, I grew up never knowing what a clear picture looked like.
To me it was almost always fuzzy or snowy or vertically challenged, but as the nuns always stressed, children in China went to bed hungry and never even got a chance to see Goldie Hawn gyrating in a bikini on “Laugh-In.”
So I counted my blessings.
Dad wouldn’t invest in a color TV because he believed there was something very suspicious about being able to turn the grass blue and the sky green when watching a ballgame. To him those tint and hue knobs were up to no good.
But again, I learned not to expect too much, being sensitive to what I perceived to be fiscal discipline and financial restraint.
This misbegotten attempt to rein in the family budget was directly responsible for the way I never accepted a shot of Novocain in the dentist’s chair, thinking that by going through all that agony I would, somehow, perhaps, put a turkey on the Thanksgiving table.
It was, of course, utter nonsense. Back then dentists were using actual mercury in fillings so what did it matter? It was like saving Green Stamps for a bike while an atomic bomb was detonated in the next county over.
But to get back to Turkey Day for just a moment, there came a year — I think it was just after Dick Nixon won in 1968 — when Dad decided the time had come to forgo his traditional carving implements.
Toward that end, he walked into the hardware store downtown and bought an electric knife.
This was akin to Bob Dylan plugging in his guitar at Newport or having Walter Cronkite come out against the war in Vietnam.
It was unthinkable.
But there he was, a proud paternal presence, our lightning rod in a world of chaos, our Truth North at a time when gyroscopes were titling out of control. He stood there, in front of the whole family, and went electric.
Well, not the whole family.
I was in the family room watching a football game, and at the moment my father pressed the power button on his new toy, the screen erupted into a spasm of black-and-white fireworks, the entire image obliterated by sparks and photons, a total meltdown, Three Mile Island a decade before anyone had heard of the place.
Naturally, I was calm.
“Hey!” I yelled up the stairs to the aromatic kitchen where I could hear what sounded like an angry buzz saw ravaging a virgin forest. “What the hell’s going on up there? The TV’s gone nuts!”
In my heart of hearts, though, I knew precisely what was happening, and it had everything to do with the fact our TV antenna, rather than being outside on the roof, was instead trapped in what amounted to an attic prison.
If Anne Frank had been a piece of unfortunate low-tech gadgetry, she would have resembled that sad collection of metal and wires.
Because what that new carving knife had done to the TV wasn’t exactly a bolt from the sky.
Dad, in addition to his skill as a turkey carver, was an accomplished sewing machine maestro, able to patch ripped jeans as easily as he could create slipcovers for the chairs and draperies for the windows.
He could make that Singer sing.
The only problem was that every single time he fired it up, three floors above the TV room, the picture — which wasn’t very sharp to begin with — went spastic. It didn’t take me long to make the connection, but after four or five sprints up the stairs to Dad’s sewing nook, asking him to stop, I began to feel ashamed of myself.
Wasn’t hemming Mom’s not-so-new dress more important than “American Bandstand,” even if the Dave Clark 5 was coming on?
Didn’t my brother’s vestments — he was in a phase during which he fancied himself to have a vocation for the priesthood — outrank even the best episode of “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.”?
Couldn’t I deal with a brief interruption of the Joe Namath Super Bowl so that our family dog might be able to have a winter coat?
It made me feel downright selfish, living up to the “Wretched Flea” moniker Mom had hung on me years before, when my egotistic narcissism was still in its nascent stages.
I’m older now, some would even say old, but I still remember that useless TV antenna stuck inside that chilly crawlspace, unable to do the only job it had. And I can’t help but wonder how different things might have been had we only had cable.