My earliest recollection of watching television was seeing the Howdy Doody Show on a huge black-and-white rounded screen.

My brothers and I were only allowed to watch for less than an hour and as I recall (which might not be right), we didn’t watch TV on Sunday.

That was in the 1950s.

Fast forward to the 1960s and TV was becoming part of our family routine. There were certain shows we watched each week – Lawrence Welk, Gunsmoke, Sing Along with Mitch (Miller) and Ed Sullivan on Sunday nights.

We saw the famous first appearance of The Beatles on Ed Sullivan’s Show. It was a big event and we all gathered around the TV to see this “British Invasion.”

That was on a fragile black-and-white TV that had glass tubes in the back that sometimes burned out. We took the tubes up to a convenience store. It had a machine that would test and see which tube was burned out. The store sold most of the replacement tubes.

Back in the sixties, if you wanted to change the channel, you had one of your kids walk up to the TV and turn a knob. While he was up there, you might have him adjust the antenna (rabbit ears) to get a better picture. You turned the TV off during a thunderstorm because you couldn’t get great reception and you didn’t want a lightning strike to blow out all your tubes.

In 1968, my Dad bought a state-of-the-art 19-inch RCA black-and-white TV. This was just a couple of years after he bought a car with air conditioning.

He bought it so we could watch the 1968 Olympics in style.

The next great leap forward was cable television. My Dad called it “pay TV.” He swore he would never pay for something that you could get for free but after a while, he broke down and starting paying $10 a month for Tulsa Cable.

With the introduction of cable, we got a “cable box.” It was attached to the TV with a long cable (what else?) and the best part was you could sit in your Lazy Boy and change channels. As quick as you wanted and as fast as you wanted.

It changed TV watching forever.

Later, wireless remote controls became popular and the cable box went the way of buggy whips.

We were fascinated when color TV started being broadcast. We had a black-and-white set so I was captivated is I went to someone’s house that had a color set.

I bought a portable 10-inch black-and-white TV that I took with me to college. I used it mostly to watch sports and comedy shows on CBS in 1970s (including MASH, Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newheart and Carol Burnett).

My wife and I got our first color set after we got married in the 1980s. It was a 25-inch RCA in a beautiful wooden cabinet. It was a great TV but sometimes the color was hard to adjust. We got cable because we were not satisfied with the reception and it had a lot more channels.

Fast forward to 2022, and we now have at least four “Smart” TVs in our house and almost 10 computers that can act like television sets.

We have cable TV. We really didn’t want cable but we have our office in our home so we needed high-speed cable access. The cable company convinced us that if we “bundled” our home TV with high-speed Internet and telephone service for our house and our business, we would save money in the long run.

I am not so sure we have.

Cable tries to sell premium channels and we have resisted. There must be several hundred channels on cable and honestly, we probably never watch more than a dozen. Many channels are on there more than once.

And now, instead of having one channel selecter, we have three: the cable’s device, a Roku box our son bought us and one more that our daughter got – I am not sure what it does but my guess is it’s for subscriber video games or movies.

I have to use one remote to turn the TV, another to change channels and back to the first one to increase or lower the volume.

I hope to get college credit if I ever figure out how all of this works.

I am not opposed to technology – I use it at work every day – but I don’t like TVs that are not “user friendly” or TV sets that are “smarter” than I am.

Our TVs do so much, I am not sure I will ever go back to a movie theater to see a show.

Oh, well. At least I don’t have to go to a convenience store to get my tubes tested or get up to change the channel.