Today’s the Day
Little by little we are finishing up the last piece of our latest curriculum project. I had fun writing about 1950s television, the age of I Love Lucy, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, and Lassie. Americans owned only 7,000 televisions in 1947, so television was brand new to just about everybody. Television was growing by the time Ray was born in 1952 and I was born in 1953. By 1960 the number had risen from 7,000 to 50,000,000.
Ray’s home and my home each had one of those 50,000,000 television sets. Ours was a big, wooden console model with a circular dial to change the channels and a square plastic button you pushed to turn the TV off and on.
We typically watched Romper Room and Captain Kangaroo in the morning before school. Beginning in 1961, we had a special treat some mornings, when we got to watch a Mercury 7 astronaut take off into space. One day Alan Shepard went up for fifteen minutes. On another day, Gus Grissom went up for fifteen minutes. Then, on February 20, 1962, John Glenn climbed into Friendship 7 and became the first American to orbit the earth in space! We watched it live on black and white television!
Ray and I agree that we watched way too much television as children. Neither of us had to look at a clock in the evening. We knew what time it was by what was on television.
Back in those days, you watched a television show and you saw what you saw. If you stepped out of the room for a few minutes, you missed it. You might get a chance to see it again when the networks showed that episode again during summer reruns. Other than that, if you missed it, you missed it.
When folks like Ray’s family or my Daddy Leland and his sons, son-in-law, and grandsons watched a football game on television, they watched the game straight through. That all changed during a televised Army-Navy game on December 7, 1963. The game came close to being cancelled out of respect for President Kennedy, who had been assassinated two weeks before. Jackie Kennedy insisted that the game be played and so it was.
Tony Verna, a young television director, surprised everyone that day when he broadcast America’s first instant replay. He was so scared that it wouldn’t work that he didn’t tell anyone about it until just before the game. On the way to the football stadium, he told his crew that they might do something new.
When Army scored a one-yard touchdown, Verna showed it again — the first instant replay. The feat took two tape decks, brought to the game in a huge truck. Each tape deck was the size of a refrigerator. When the replay played, famous sports announcer Lindsey Nelson told the television audience that Army had not scored again! What else would they think since they’d never seen anything like that before?
It wasn’t until 1985 that Ray and I purchased a device to record a television show and watch it again at another time. Not until we purchased our VCR could we answer the question, “What did he say?” with the push of the rewind button.
I keep lists of things I might write to you about sometime. When I sat down to write to you last night, I looked at one of my lists. I scrolled back to the oldest note I had filed away. Ironically, the note was dated December 7, 2013 — fifty years to the day after the first instant replay. The note I wrote to myself on that December 7 was this one:
“You can’t rewind childhood.”
I had come across that sentence on a particular website back in 2013, and I had noted the website. When I searched for it last night, I found the website defunct and the domain name was for sale. I’m glad I wrote it down when I did. Thinking about our inability to rewind childhood made me think of television and the instant replay. Ray, who is my resident walking and talking dictionary-Bible concordance-encyclopedia, didn’t have when the instant replay began in his brain file, so I had to turn to Google, the next best thing.
While I was writing you last night, Ray and I got a knock on our hotel door (we are at yet another homeschool conference). At the door were our son John and our son-in-law Nate. “Wanna play some cards?” they wondered.
You can’t rewind childhood. Children have got to live their childhoods right now. They don’t get a second chance, and we don’t get a second chance to experience their childhoods.
No matter the ages of our children, we have to take advantage of our opportunities when they come. Whether it’s holding a toddler’s hand, building a tower with a four-year-old, having a tea party with a daughter who’s ten, watching a son make his first goal, or playing cards in a hotel lobby, the time to live life together is now. You can’t rewind childhood and you can’t rewind opportunities either.
Let’s not waste time wallowing in regrets. Today is the day to hold the hand, build the tower, have the tea party, watch the first goal, or play some cards.
This is the day which the Lord has made;
Let us rejoice and be glad in it.
Psalm 118:24