I was made in Greenville, Tennessee in 1980, a 22-inch Magnavox color model to beat the band. Solid-state with a faux-wood casing. I was boxed up and trucked to a store near South Saint Paul, Minnesota. Before long a man and a tall boy pulled my box off the stack, put me in a cart, carried me out to a car and took me away.
They took me to the house where they lived with a woman and a girl. The family freed me from the confines of the cardboard box and plugged me in. They watched me, alone or together, for the next few years.
Each of the four liked different shows. The man watched football on autumn weekends and Monday nights, but not much else. The boy liked a show called ChiPs and anything else with motorcycles. The woman watched a show called Lou Grant, and otherwise would listen to whatever was on while she read the mail, magazines or newspapers. The girl, who was younger than the boy, liked Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley.
I was well taken care of in those years. The woman kept an embroidered cloth on top of my casing to protect it. She did her best to prevent the others from leaving their glasses and cans there. About once a week someone would wipe my glass front with a damp cloth.
Five years later, after the tall boy had moved out, a newer, bigger TV was brought into the house. I got moved from the family room to the girl’s bedroom. By this time, the girl was as tall as the man. She was watching Moonlighting, Dynasty and Dallas. My topside became a shelf for her purse, half-eaten bags of chips, or whatever else she happened to set down there, but it wasn’t a bad life.
Another five years passed by, and now the girl had moved out, too. I left the house for the first time in 10 years when the man and the tall boy carried me out to the boy’s car one day. The boy drove me to an apartment that he shared with two other guys near Portland and Snelling in Saint Paul.
In this period I was used for watching a lot of football and basketball, as well as In the Heat of the Night and Cheers. It was smaller than my old home had been, and noisy, at least when those boys watched sports. This is when I started to get round water stains on the top of my casing. Sometimes a glass, can or coffee mug would be left there for days.
Time passed and the tall boy moved out one day. The surprising thing was he left me behind. Life didn’t change all that much right away though. Someone else took his place, and the guys watched Monday Night Football, ER, Law and Order and other shows. Sometimes the apartment would get crowded with people, all talking loudly and drinking out of plastic cups. I got spilled on more than once, and singed by the occasional cigarette ash that fell on me.
One day without warning I was carried out to the lawn by two of the guys. Some other stuff from the apartment was out there, too, like the linoleum-top table and chairs, the stuffed chair, and the boom box. People hovered over us and pointed at us. A stranger asked if he could plug me in, and one of the guys brought over an extension cord with power in it. I lit up, maybe not in an instant like I used to, but pretty darn quick if I say so myself. The stranger said, “Yep, it works,” and gave some small green papers to the guy. The stranger grunted as he picked me up, and grunted some more when he set me down in the trunk of his car.
This was the beginning of the final stage of my life. I lived in a duplex on Grand with the new young man, a young woman, and two small, grabby, drooly children. I was on a lot during the day. The woman had me tuned to The View, All My Children and General Hospital, not that she sat still and watched every second. She moved around a lot--feeding the kids, changing diapers, telling the older one to stop banging my face with his sippy cup, and so on. At night I might be tuned to Everybody Loves Raymond, JAG or NYPD Blue.
My usefulness came to a sudden, violent end when the young man and his brother were throwing a baseball around the living room one day. The woman wasn’t home at the time. They threw harder and harder, laughing at and taunting each other. It made me pretty nervous, and sure enough, all of a sudden the ball smashed through my glass screen, revealing my secrets and ruining my working parts. Both men swore very loudly at that point, and the kids, who must have been awakened by the crash, started crying.
Well, when the woman came home, there was more swearing. Within a day or two I was taken out to the alley behind the duplex, I suppose to make room for a newer, intact TV set—a set with fancy bells and whistles that back in my day TVs made do without. When the man dropped me to the ground, my glass screen separated further from the rest of me. I was done. Useless. Abandoned.
I sat there for a long time, getting rained on, snowed on, having dogs raise their legs to me. Somebody pulled out my wires and drove away with them. I saw other things—chairs, lamps--come and go as they were set out in the alley and quickly adopted by new owners. But not me. I do remember having my picture taken by a lady strolling through the alley, and that's the sad-looking picture you see here. Finally, on a sunny spring day the man and the woman threw me into a pickup truck and took me to the Ford Plant parking lot where I met lots of other lonely, abandoned TV sets. From there we were taken to our final resting place.
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