Television Memories

I started a new category of some of my memories of my family and life. It works like this; Whenever a certain memory jumps into my head, I will enter it in this category.

Today I am writing about how our family life was like in the 70's and 80's and how it differs from today.

We had two TV's, one that didn't work and aother one that did work sitting on top of the one that didn't work. We had to use a pair of pliers to turn it on. And sometimes we had to kick it. We had all of 3 or 4 stations to watch. No cable. Each kid had a certain place that they sat to watch TV. When the left the place for even a second, they would worry that some other sibling would take their place so they would say, "My place is saved." Or sometimes they would say, "My safe is placed.

When VCR's finally came out, they cost $1500 so we couldn't afford to buy one. There were only two people I knew who had a VCR. You used to go to the video store and rent the VCR and the videos. The VCR's were really big and bulky. You had to reserve the video in order to really get a decent one and you could only keep one night max. Alex' brother, Nazario got a VCR and it had a problem of over-heating and when it did, the videos would not play. So you would have to blow on the VCR to make it play again.

We didn't know any better, so our life was fun. Kids now-a-days would think this was really weird and not much fun but we had lots of good times with our rented VCR's and our old TV's that we turned on with a pair of pliers.