The struggle is real in 2021 – IOTW Report

The struggle is real in 2021

22 Comments on The struggle is real in 2021

  1. I don’t see a set of pliers hanging off the front.

    Who grew up with the old Zenith console stereos? It was a piece of furniture. My childhood centered around that thing when I wasn’t outside playing. I still have my grandparent’s console. It’s beautiful and mostly still works. Needs some cleaning.

    9
  2. No color TV for us in 73, but we did have a HiFi Radio/Phonograph player as a living room table.

    I played Beatles late 60s albums on it and thought I was denigrating it compared to the opera albums they had been playing on it.

    Oooh! I was such a bad boy! ha ha ha!

    6
  3. We got our first color TV in 1968. My Mom won it at a Sears store grand opening. She had her choice of the console TV or a mink stole. It was an easy decision. That POS broke down all the time. The TV repairman knew us by first name.

    8
  4. Our “rich” neighbors had the Curtis-Mathis. We had the plastic sheet to place over our B&W screen. Top third was blue, bottom third was green. Blam – instant color TV!

    6
  5. OMG, that is practically the exact TV my parents purchased in 1972. I remember this HUGE black and white TV for a while and then the next thing I know they purchased that huge monster of a TV. There were only 6 channels so we never used the remote which had its own little pouch in the back of the TV. We did use the turntable for our albums and we had one big wall of mirrors. It’s an Italian thing!!

    Needless to say, we had it at least for over 25 years.

    Good memories.

    God Bless us all!

    7
  6. Ha! I recently watched an old manufacturing documentary by RCA, taking you through the whole process of making console tee vees. It was a thing of beauty. All American parts and labor.

    I (or one of my sibs) was the “remote control”. I’d lay on the floor and change the channel with my toes. And, yeah, the channel changing knob was always the first thing that broke, so out came the pliers. I don’t know why they didn’t make the knob out of metal in the first place.

    Geoff C. thought that if the T.V. Guide said the program was “in color” that their black and white set would show the program in color. What a knucklehead. (sorry honey, I had to share that story).

    10
  7. married in ’71 & the first tv we bought was a 19″ b/w that sat on a rickety tubed cart w/ wheels
    moved to a ‘townhouse’ (built in the ’40’s … Greenbelt, MD) & bought a Montgomery Wards color 25″ Console w/ a 90 day warranty (remember that ’cause on day 85 it broke down & the ‘repair man’ came out, pulled out a part below the CRT & said they’d replace it …. & [here’s the kicker] the tv worked ok when he pulled the part out! …. a month later, I called Wards & they said ‘they’re working on replacing the part …
    long story short [too late!] the part was never replaced, the tv worked great for 15 years)

    2
  8. My parents had a Zenith console TV. It was one of the first remote control TV’s ever sold. When you hit that button, the TV sounded like a dump truck shifting gears. There were only three channels available back then. Before that, my siblings and I were the remote.

  9. When the TV went out, my dad would pull the bad tube and send me the the neighborhood grocery store on my bike. They’d test it and sell the proper replacement out of the cabinet under the tester. A quick bike ride back home and, boom, the TV was back in action. Good times!

    2
  10. …my friend next door was an ‘only’, so he usually had the latest electronic games. In an era when “Pong” was state-of-the-art, that meant he had an “Odyssey” game by Magnavox and a big console TV. These games had nothing but square boxes to put on the screen, so they came with painted overlays that stuck to the screen with static electricity to create the world the box was your avatar in.

    It was clumsy as heck and unplayable if you lost the overlay, but still TONS of fun for ’70s kids like US…

    https://youtu.be/jLGBtkKPj2U

Comments are closed.