Chip Shadd’s Interview with a Family Friend

His name is Larry Eaton, and he is seventy-five years old.  Larry lives in Glendale in an apartment.  I do not know many seniors so he was the best candidate.  All my grandparents live in far away places so it would be difficult to interview them. He was a friend of my dad from a very long time ago.  Now he is a family friend whom we see on holidays or family outings.  In our interview, he will be talking about television as the biggest change he had seen in his life.  He wants to talk about television because he recalls that when he was in high school, there was no television.  He also commented that television has changed the world; however he did not go into mush detail about that. Perhaps we will find out in the interview.

In 1937, I was in the fourth or fifth grade; I remember the advent of television.  It was on display at the world fair.  Until then, we had radio.  We had a lot of stuff on radio that you don’t have today like adventure stories and news.  We couldn’t actually see it on TV so people did build up their imagination much better in those days.  If we wanted to see the news, we had to go to a movies theater and see a news reel.   TVs spread through newspapers and it was talked about on the radio.  Also, it appeared in the Weekly Reader in school.  There weren’t very many TV sets then, maybe about a dozen or so.  It advanced slowly.  But once they putting station around the country, then people started buying television and it just kept growing from there.  I got my first TV set in 1950, right after I got married.  At that time, all we had was black and white. Now we’re going into high definition. I watched TV one or two hours an evening.  I was working full time then, and there were children around.  My folk’s first TV set was like a little ten inch console.  My first one was a great big 16 inches, and I thought I had a monster. 

I think it changes the way people think about politics, other people, racism and other countries.  It made the world very much smaller. We get to see what other countries are really like other than crazy movies that happen to end up over there.  I think TVs are good things, but they could also be bad things if they’re misunderstood by what is shown.  It can bring misunderstandings as well as learning.  Television is bad in a way it has treated a lot of things in society today such as, should I say the words, sex, and war.  The way we are able to look at somebody getting chopped up in a murder, it doesn’t seem to bother us any more.  We also go into operation rooms and see people being cut open and their hearts pulled out, and it doesn’t seem to bother us an much anymore.  We seemed to have lost a lot of our feelings.  In a good way, we also found out a lot of things about animals and the world, history and things that we don’t learn any other way by seeing them in pictures, and moving pictures. 

Well it’s a mixed blessing actually.  We probably won’t have as much privacy in our lives as we used to have.  We don’t have as much privacy now as we used to have.  With family life, parents are able to help the child grow with television and not see the things they shouldn’t see on TV.  Believe me there are a lot of things they shouldn’t see. I think TV is great.  I watch probably four or five hours, maybe six hours a day.  It’s educational in ways, and it could be wrong education as well on TV.  It has to do with a lot of the families that the boys and girls are growing up in as well as what the TV itself is doing.

TV has sort of captured me.  I found it very fascinating, and it was one step beyond the movie theater, and I got a lot of new ideas.  I saw more of the world and got a better look at what the news was talking about and it showed me actual pictures instead of just words.  Without TV, the world would be much larger because we would not know what’s going on in other countries without traveling to those countries and seeing it.  There are a lot of things that are invented today that have to be shown on TV to get people to buy them in the first place.  If they can’t see them, and don’t know about them through TV, they would probably not buy them and lots of things would not be on the market today.  TV is a big sales thing.  Our world will be a whole lot different without TV.  The way television is going, we’re probably going to be communication through television rather than just watching it.  And eventually, television will all be one thing one day.    

Interviewed by Chip Shadd