> > I am glad there are 3 other Rinkworkers out there who enjoy the feeling to have no Tv! I always get made fun of at school, and people always ask, why dont you get a tv? I reply, why dont you get good grades. Because I believe TV is one of the downfalls of society. I am not saying that all the people who have Tv's are bad, but some people abuse the right wayy too much.
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> That's the key right there. There's nothing inherently wrong with it, but the way it gets abused and overused is unfortunate. I hear about what my parents did as kids, and it's amazing what exciting and creative things they used to do with their free time. My grandparents have even more exciting stories to tell. And, alas, people younger than me have less to tell than I do. Meanwhile, the number of hours kids spend in front of the TV or playing computer games is increasing at a phenomenal rate. Our eventual kids won't be denied television, but the time spent in front of it will be heavily limited.

I didn't have TV when I was a kid. There wasn't any TV. I didn't miss it a bit. We had a radio, but in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky, you could only listen to the radio after sundown. That was when signals from Louisville and Nashville skipped in beteen the hills. I never did understand how that worked.

I guess I grew up in the same period as Sam's parents. We played kick the can, hide and seek, and go sheepie go until 10:00 PM and often ran all over town after dark. There was nothing dangerous about it in those days. We hiked in the hills sometimes miles from town, and nobody ever got lost or hurt.

You couldn't get toys during the war, so me made most of the stuff we played with. We dammed up the creek for a swimming hole and made swings on hillside so we could swing out 20 feet above the ground. When I was in elementary school, every boy in the class carried a pocket knife to school every day. I don't remember anybody falling off a swing, or getting cut by a knife, but one kid broke his arm when we were playing 'round town in the street. He fell on a curb. Oh - 'round town is a form of baseball played with a broomstick and a tennis ball. There were no foul balls. If you hit it behind you, it was in play. Everybody played against the batter. If he hit a homerun he was the next batter. You didn't have to tag him with the ball to put him out. You just threw it at him. Ouch!

We fished in the North Fork of the Kentucky River.
Tackle was a stick, a string, a flat washer, and a store-bought hook. Sometimes we used a cork.

I watch a little TV now and then, but we got along without it in the old days.

The first time I ever saw a TV was in Nashville in 1951. I was almost 18. Nashville only had one station then.

Do I ramble?
Howard