🎭 Theatre Writeups, 🛣️ Highway Updates, 📰 Musings on the News, and other 🗯️ Rants and Roadkill Along the Information Superhighway
(sniff) My daughter came home from Summer School with two technical manuals for lighting consoles in her theatrical lighting class, and is spending the evening reading them.
(sniff) Boy, that brings back memories of my youth. Curled up reading “Fortran IV with WATFOR and WATFIV”. Nothing better for passing a summer evening than a technical manual.
One of the blogs I enjoy reading at the LA Times is the “Daily Mirror” blog, which looks at news stories from the past, and includes various ads from the era. Today, one of the posts was about the death of ex-Mayor Frank Poole, but what interested me was the ad in the corner of the January 24, 1958 front page:
Now, think about the naivete of the times. You submit your social security numbers to the newspaper for a contest. Forty of them are published each day in the paper. If a newspaper did that today, imagine the uproar.
You realize that many young people today probably don’t remember when times were that simple, when we didn’t have to worry about identity theft. When faith was extended on a signature and a handshake, or an unverified letter of reference, as opposed to background checks and googling? My, how times have changed!
Last night, I watched an interesting film on IFC called The Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession. This film focused on the Z Channel and its programmer, Jerry Harvey.
What was the Z Channel, you ask? Back in the early days of cable television in Los Angeles, there was this cable system in Santa Monica called Theta Cable. I was familiar with them because, at the time, we lived up Kenter Canyon in Brentwood, and TV reception was crap. It was cable or nothing. Theta provided their customers with a wired cable box that had a slider switch for channels from A to Z. To put this in context: there were no cable-ready TVs; no VCRs; no national cable networks. Theta, given its audience of movie-industry people, started a premium channel called The Z Channel. This channel showed recently released movies, about four per week, uncut. To those raised with HBO or Sho, this may sound like nothing; but back then, the only way to see movies was either in the theatre, or via encrypted over-the-air services such as On-TV (Ch 52) or SelectTV (Ch 22), which had image quality problems.
What made the Z channel special was its programming mix. Very eclectic: major movies and little known films (I particulary remember watching The Crazy World of Julius Vrooder on the channel; I’ve never seen it again). I was in my early teens at the time the Z channel started: this way my only way to see some of this stuff.
Time passed. Theta was sold to Group W, and is now part of the Adelphia holding. The Z Channel died in competition with the national satellite providers. Yet I still have fond memories of those days. This movie brought them back.
I’m sitting here in my dad’s office, looking around at all the binders, and thinking about all the stuff I’ve run into. For example, I’ve found a ledger detailing his daily living expenses between 1953 and 1960. Some examples:
Mar 18 1953: 1 pr White Sneakers (Sears Roebuck): $3.74
July 10 1953: 1 pr Black Pedal Pushers: $2.98
Apr 30 1957: 1 Cashmere Sweater: $16.59
Nov 11 1955: 1 21″ TV Set: $159.95
I’ve found family holiday letters dating back to 1980. I’ve found the correspondence between my father and his 1st wives’ friends relating to her hospitalization and their divorce. Of course, I’ve got tax files for his accounting firm dating back to the mid-1980s. I’ve got loads of Navy pictures and recollections, and of course, loads and loads of Al Jolson memorabilia. I’ve written before about the mini-Office Depot. Looking in the supply closet, I can see 17 staplers, 12 calculators, 15 hole-punches of various types, boxes and boxes of staples and ACCO fasteners, multiple Dymo/Rotex labellers, numerous transistor radios, and so on.
I’ve been able to see the evolution of the man, from his younger self to the man I got to know as I was an adult (for we really don’t get to know our parents as people when we are children). I’ve seen the evidence of the times he was scared, when he had to look for work, of the trials in his life. I’m glad that I got to know him, but now that I’ve learned his past, I wish he was here so we could talk about it.
This is something I never got to see with my mother. Because of her nature, we weren’t talking much at the time she died, and so my dad did most of the cleanup of her stuff. Thus, I never really got to know the person: I rejected knowing her when I was an adult because of our personality clashes; I didn’t know her as a child. I don’t really know her story: her trials, her successes. She really didn’t keep memoriabilia, or at least not that I know of.
My question is this: Why do we keep this stuff? What does this memorabilia (and the stuff we keep) say about us and our lives? Do we keep the stuff from the good times, the times we want to relive? I’ve found very little from the late 1960s and early 1970s, which is when my brother was older and up to his death. Was that a time my dad was trying to forget? Are all the office supplies an expression of growing up during the depression?
What does what we have at home say about our lives? When my daughter, in 50 years, has to do a dig through my stuff, what will she think? I know I have very little from my college days, although I do have stuff from the UCLA Computer Club. I have lots of stuff from camp, but practically nothing from High School. I have photos and stuff from the early days of my marriage, but little career correspondence.
We seem to carry with us a lot of debris. I’ve begun to learn that the debris only serves to slow us down. It can make it harder to move on in ones life (I think one of the reasons I don’t want to change houses is that this would mean I’d have to pack up stuff). Yet, when we throw it away, do we make it harder for our children to learn about us as people?
So: What debris and memorabilia do you have? What story would it tell? Do you find yourself consciously keeping less debris from the bad times, from your missspent youth?
