Kaleidoscope Memories

When I was a kid, my parents did not order magazines. In addition, I scarcely recall having my fingers stained with newspaper ink from any tangible form of readable media.

Instead, we got our news from the boob tube.

CBS and Walter Cronkite.

Every evening.

Nothing would stop my dad from sitting in front of that television screen to learn what was happening around the world.

From hostage crises to oil embargoes to the AIDS epidemic.

As for my mom, she followed ABC. Charles Gibson and Joan Lunden on Good Morning America were more her style.

Were it not for the occasional — home from school — sick day, I would have never imagined my mom watching the news, but she did — the sanitized stay-at-home wife kind.

Yup.

Media in our house arrived in the form of whatever was on television.

In fact, the only tangible media objects (besides television and handheld radios) that I remember as a kid were those large 8-track tapes. However, I was never allowed to touch those sacred plastic boxes.

When we would all pile into the Dodge Aspen, perhaps on a late Sunday afternoon for ice cream at Carvel, my parents would grab a stack of those giant cartridges and forget they…