Yes, We've Come A Long Ways

When I was watching the BFA/Hazen basketball game last night on my computer live, was just thinking how far we have come. I looked on the Internet to try and find a Console Atwater Kent Radio, like the one we had given to us by my grandmother after my grandfather died and that was the nearest I could find. It stood about 3 feet high and was probably 2 feet wide and 18 inches in depth. It had big old tubes inside and we had to run an antenna wire from the back out under the window to a tree in the back yard. We had to wait a few years before we even tried to use it as when my grandmother gave it to us, we did not have electricity.

I remember listening to the deaths which were broadcast every noon, Monday through Friday over WWSR St. Albans. If there was a broadcast by the President, we would listen to that and of course my Dad loved boxing, so if there was a championship fight, he would listen to that.

In the later 1940s we got a small portable radio that didn't need a long exterior antenna, but found that it did work better if we placed it up on top of our old hand-crank wall telephone. Apparently it would grab the radio signals from the phone lines or something. Somewhere around the mid 1950s, I bought our first television set from Tobins in Cambridge. This was when I was still single and living at home. We didn't get much for stations but just marveled at how great it was. I was sold on it when we were invited down to Shorty & Rita Lemoine, who lived just down the road from us at the time, to watch television one night and saw Jackie Gleason on TV.

In the mid 1970s a new means of communication arrived, called the CB Radio. This was just fantastic I thought. I started off by having one in my Volkswagon Rabbit and later got a base station for the house. I went hog wild and had a big antenna which stood on my roof for years. We met many good friends while in the CB phase. Once the cell phones came into being, however, we found that we no longer used the CB Radio. Here locally in Fairfax, there was a blind man who lived across from the Old Steeple Market by the name of Stan Driscoll. Stan had his CB Radio on 24 hours a day and most people knew if they came through Fairfax that Stan would be monitoring Channel 2. It they had any questions as to where somebody might live or needed directions or help, Stan was there. He was like a miniature local news station and as people would come through town, he would visit with them, they would give him news and he would give them news, which gave us pretty much up to the minute news of what was going on in town.

One program that Stan always listened to was Paul Harvey, the ABC Radio guy who just died at the age of 90. He would always get on his CB and retell the stories of the day which were usually broadcast around lunch time.

Not sure just how long ago it was, but probably in the 1980s, computers came of age and also the Internet. Well, we had no local access here in Fairfax for Internet, so Brad Murray set up a local internet where you could dial in and communicate locally. This is when I actually started my web site. Brad progressed to a point where we eventually were able to communicate with the outside world as he would upload to the World Wide Net once a day and also download. This went on until we eventually had Together.Net come in and we were able to get on the Internet via dial-up which we thought was absolutely outstanding.

A few years ago, we happened to be fortunate enough to be able to get DSL from Verizon and that is what we have today and feel is the Cat's Meow. What an absolutely fantastic thing I thought as I watched BFA play Hazen last night.

What will happen in the next few years - Well, I suspect some new and greater thing will come along and we will look back at what we have now as kind of a poor comparison of what we have then.