A Life in Four Colors Part Fifty-Five

I am about to reveal a secret from the early years of our marriage that those who know me may find unbelievable.

For the first two years that Susan and I were wed, we did not have a telephone.

And here's another secret almost equally shocking.

For the first two years, we almost did not have a television.

The former speaks for itself, but let me explain what I mean by the latter. We did own a television--a 13" black and white television. We also had a very poor antenna mounted just outside the living room window, and an antenna wire that ran around the baseboard, over the door frame, to a splitter that went to the tiny little television and to the FM input of our stereo record player/FM receiver (a Singer unit that I had owned before we got married, purchased by my parents at the Singer Sewing Center in Gala Shopping Center--and yes indeed, Singer carried Singer-branded stereo equipment as well as sewimg machines).

The antenna was so basic that we could only pick up channel 2 on a regular basis, and sometimes (if the weather was right and the gods smiled upon us) Channel 11. Nothing else. And even those channels would distort and go fuzzy when the train passed near our house--an event that happened at least six times a day. So we rarely used the television at all; the antenna was enough to bring in a few radio stations, so we did listen to FM radio every now and then, but not much.

As a result, my popular culture knowledge has a two-year gap as far as television is concerned. For example: The New Dick Van Dyke Show aired on CBS from September 1971 to March of 1974. Not only did I not see a single episode of this series, I didn't even remember that it existed until I ran across some bootlegged copies at a convention.  And I'm an avid fan of the original Dick Van Dyke Show and of Dick Van Dyke himself. So why didn't I watch it? Because Channel 5 was the Atlanta CBS affiliate, and we only picked up Channels 2 & 11.

While we could have watched shows on NBC (Channel 2 was Atlanta's NBC affiliate at the time, although that would change in 1981) and occasionally on ABC (Channel 11 was Atlanta's ABC affiliate back then, before it switched networks with Channel 2), we didn't. The reception was simply too unreliable, and the television was so small that we didn't watch entertainment programming. Susan liked to turn the teevee on while we were making dinner so that she could see ( or more specifically, hear) the local weather, but that was about it.

We would not get a color television until 1974, when we bought a used 23" set from our friend Larry Mason, who worked for Atlanta electronics repair specialists Norman Electronics and had personally ensured the the television was worth the hundred bucks that he was asking for it. He was correct; it was a great television, and it gave us almost ten years of great service before the tube failed. That was also the year that we decided we could afford to splurge $8 a month for cable TV, which meant that we could watch VHF channels from Atlanta and Chattanooga and UHF channels from Atlanta. Thus began my renewed fascination with television as a medium and the sitcom as an artform--a fascination that remains with me to this day.

As for the phone--well, it simply wasn't in our budget. We lived two houses away from my grandmother, so if an urgent problem came up and we absolutely had to make a phone call, I could walk up to her house and ask to use her phone. We were also only two miles from Susan's old family home, and as her father begrudgingly accepted the fact that we were married, we would drive over there a few times a week to see her sister and brother and even her grandmother, with whom Susan struggled to maintain a relationship. Lastly, there was a small grocery store a half-mile from our house that had a pay phone outside. So we could use a phone if we were willing to go to the trouble ard/or pay the dime for the phone call. I don't have a specific count as to how many times we took advantage of that opportunity while during the two years that we didn't have a phone, but I don't think it was more than a dozen.

It didn't mean we were out of touch with my family and our friends. I was attending school in Rome and working in West Rome, about a mile from my parents' house. If time allowed, I would run by the house and see Mom while grabbing a sandwich for lunch. (Mom always had something I could use as the base for a lunch sandwich, which certainly helped our grocery budget.) Sometimes Dad would be home for lunch, too, so I would get a chance to talk with both of them. As a result, I was seeing at least one of my parents several times a week--and we would always go by their house to see them on Saturdays if we went to Rome. Once a month, they would come down to Cedartown to see my grandmother, so we would either see them at grandmother's house or they would walk down to our house to see us. While we didn't talk on the phone, we talked in person, and that was better.

We would see our closest friends--Gary Steele and Sven Ahlstrom and, later on, Larry Mason--almost every weekend. We would shop for comics and SF and mysteries and albums together, and we did a-apazines and fanzines together. We were great friends, so close that we had an open door policy for one another. When our friend Sven found himself briefly without a place to stay, he lived with us for a week or three in that tiny house. Gary Steele spent many weekend nights at our house after he stayed over so late working on a fanzine that he didn't feel like driving back to Rome.

Even out of town friends like Don Markstein, Stven Carlberg, Cecil Hutto, Steve & Binker Hughes, and mike weber stayed at that tiny, decrepit house. Cedartown was becoming a fan nexus (even if Cedartown neither knew nor cared that it was becoming a fan nexus). But without a phone, how did we stay in contact with our out-of-town friends between visits? We wrote letters! Susan and I wrote lots of letters and got lots of mail. Hardly a day went by that we didn't get at least one letter from one or more of those friends.  And a lot of those were multi-page letters; in those typed pages (all of my friends typed their letters, as did we), we talked about so much more than we would ever have discussed in a phone call.

Those who know me now realize that I am never without my iPhone; it may be hard for them to believe that for two years Susan and I did not have a phone and did not feel like we were missing anything. And all of my friends know how much Susan loved television (she loved it even more than I did, which is why she wanted both DirecTV and Comcast to ensure that she didn't miss anything, and we had about a half dozen Tivos, eight DirecTV receivers, and two Comcast boxes in Lansdowne  (the main house), along with ten tuners and an attic antenna in Marchmont (the overflow house) so that we could record over-the-air programming as a backup.

But for two years we didn't watch entertainment programming at all, and didn't care.

Sometimes I look back on those two years and wonder how we found the time to write all those letters, do all those fanzines, and read all those books and comics while working (Susan held a full-time 40 hour a week job, while I was working 25 hours a week on average)--and I was taking a full class load at Berry, and in some quarters an overload! It would seem like we should have had no spare time at all.

And yet, in spite of it all, those were two of the most glorious years of our lives.