Get the picture?

I have satellite TV at my house. We subscribe to the “most expensive possible” package, which means we have about 1,789 channels to choose from.

I sat there on Saturday, flipped through all of them, and declared with disgust, “There’s nothing on TV.”

My children look at me as if I were a space alien when I tell them what watching TV was like when I was a kid – how there were only three channels, unless you lived close enough to Atlanta to pick up Channel 17; how children doubled as remote controls (Mark, go change the channel); how we had to go outside and adjust the antenna so it wouldn’t look like we were watching All In the Family through a snowstorm.

One of the greatest inventions my dad brought home was a device that remotely rotated the antenna, which was normally found on the roof. It was a boxy contraption and had a big dial in the middle, and when you turned the dial, the antenna would also turn. It seemed like magic, at the time, like something from The Jetsons!

This device was necessary because in those pre-cable, pre-satellite days, TV reception could be an iffy thing, and it required a lot of antenna adjustment.

We lived about 40 miles from Atlanta, so most days the reception was fine, but sometimes the picture could get a little snowy. This was especially true on windy days. So somebody – me – would have to go outside and turn the antenna around, while somebody else – my dad - stayed in the house and yelled to indicate when the antenna was in the right place. This could be very frustrating, because sometimes I’d think I had it just right, and I’d sit down and try to watch Sanford and Son, and Lamont’s face would get wavy, and out I would go again.

If you watched TV during the’70s, then you know what rabbit ears are. These were the tiny antennas that you hooked up to a smaller TV that wasn’t worthy of being connected to the giant rooftop antenna. There were all sorts of tricks to make rabbit ears work better, and they were all necessary, because they generally weren’t worth a crap.

You could get a coat hanger and attach it to the rabbit ears to make them longer. You could wrap aluminum foil around them to improve reception. Sometimes, the reception even depended on where you were in the room. I remember thinking that we could put a man on the moon, but I had to stand on my head to watch Welcome Back Kotter.

The main channels – 2, 5, and 11 – were VHF channels. Then you had the UHF channels, and we could only pick up one of those, Channel 17. I loved Channel 17 because it televised Braves’ and Hawks’ games, and reruns of Leave It To Beaver and Gilligan’s Island (man, I loved that Mary Ann). But getting a clear picture on Channel 17 really was in God’s hands. You never knew if you were going to see Mary Ann in a halter top or the visual equivalent of an LSD trip when you turned to that channel.

So, I never had to walk three miles to school barefoot in the snow, and I didn’t get just an orange and a new pair of overalls for Christmas, but I had my share of hardships as a kid. Of course, someday my kids will probably tell their kids, “Can you believe we only had 1,789 TV channels when we were young? You have it too easy!”