The Couch

Much of our family time was spent in the living room. We got a television when I was around three years old. My dad was always someone who wanted to have the newest “gadgets” that were available and although we were not a wealthy family, I suspect we fell right in the middle of the bell shaped curve for SES, we were usually the first family on our block who had the newest piece of technology. Television was a big thing for that era. I can remember neighbors gathering on our front porch to watch it through the living room window. I was so young that I don’t remember the experience but remember feeling that this whole thing was weird. The first television we had was really awful. It had a tiny little kind of oval screen, black and white picture, and a lot of snowy interference. Television shows were not predictable and there were usually lots of time slots in the middle of the day when nothing was being broadcast. The television had tubes that were forever blowing out and so Daddy had to constantly fiddle with them, trying to get the set to work properly. I can remember going to the store with him while he tested the tubes to see which ones were working and which ones weren’t. The vast majority of the first few years we had the television set it was usually turned so the back of the set faced the middle of the room and daddy was usually on his knees trying to get the tubes in or out depending on where he was in the process of trying to fix the darned thing. Gradually Portland got more than one station and we were able to watch shows regularly throughout the day and evening. By the time I was in high school there was some kind of programming until about two in the morning when the stations would have terrible programming and really horrible B movies. I watched a lot of these when I was babysitting into the wee hours.

Beverly & Karry

Television 1957

(Updated from our first TV)

There were lots of times however, when we would sit in the living room and not watch television, but read, or play the piano, or just talk (I know that this is unheard of today, but honestly we TALKED to each other). Daddy usually had the newspaper or a magazine in front of him and I was an avid bibliophile with my mug in a book most of the time. I read frequently but not particularly widely, although I think I read well beyond my years. For example by grade five I was reading things like The Silver Challis, Jane Eyre, and The Robe. Obviously I spent a lot of time in the library at St. Rose School! So when I started ninth grade at Mark Morris, I was exposed to new and interesting reading material. I had spent a lot of time at the city library as a child but it was always in the children’s room in the basement, and the collection there was very curtailed for the little one’s safety. However, Mark Morris was a public junior high school and there was no telling what those heathens might have on their shelves! Naturally, I had no idea of what I might find and so just started picking up whatever was within my reach. One Saturday afternoon Daddy and I were alone at home. He was in his rocker and I was on the couch reading my library book. I must have been really into the story about the young man during Revolutionary times when our forefathers were forming our nation, because I had no idea that I was reacting to what was on the written page. I must have made quite a few shocked inhales of breath because Daddy finally turned to me and said, “What are you reading?” I responded by innocently showing him the cover of the book, but he was having none of that. He told me to turn it over and let him take a look at it because something was certainly shocking me. I can clearly remember that I sure didn’t want him to see that I was reading my first few lines of what I considered to be real smut! Here were the briefest of descriptions of a young man feeling up a girl, tweaking her nipples. I’d never seen the word “nipple” written in a book before, so I was really shocked! However, there was no going back, Daddy was not backing down and I was going to show him that book. So I finally handed it over. I’m sure that he had great difficulty not bursting into laughter, but he controlled himself and asked me what I thought of what I was reading. I exclaimed that I was shocked and dismayed by the fact that this kind of garbage could be present in a school library. He asked what I was going to do about it and I proclaimed that I thought they shouldn’t have that kind of book in a library where children could be exposed to it. I thought it was obscene and that we should get the book thrown out of the library. This was my Dad’s first inkling that I would one day become an activist of some kind and if he had known it, I’m sure he would have stopped me in my tracks, but I was off to see what I could do. Naturally, I didn’t get far because, thank goodness, there were saner and more mature heads around to stop my rabble rousing. In retrospect I really appreciated the fact that Daddy didn’t laugh me out of the house, but made me think through what actions I should take if I thought something was wrong.