CSotD: Comics for the Old Folks
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Let's warm up with a trio that assumes you are old and can remember ancient times:
Juxtaposition of the Day
There have been cartoons about how the "remote" back in analog days consisted of telling your kid to change the channel, but the frequent need to adjust the vert hold and horiz hold were a pretty good inducement to get off your duff.
And maybe having an engineer for a father is part of this, but I don't recall this as a case of where the kids were better at it than Dad. I would assume the children of a safe cracker would also agree, but there was a certain manly pride in being able to get a good picture on the Zenith.
In our family, the engineering thing really came to the fore when we combined the antenna rotor with the label maker. There are still gags floating around about guys up on the roof turning the antenna, and I'm old enough to have done some of that as an adult living in more urban areas.
But in those bygone days, those of us truly living in the sticks could get more channels without climbing onto the roof each time we switched by installing a rotor to turn the antenna.
In our case, turning the indicator to about 12 o'clock got stations from Ottawa, we'd crank it to about 9 or 10 for Kingston and Watertown, 6 or 7 to pick up Syracuse, 3 for Plattsburgh/Burlington and about 2 for Montreal.
That could have been on a list, but my dad had one of those plastic label things and an engineer's obsessive urges, so that our rotor dial was festooned with little labels showing the best place to point for each channel in each market. Then, when we got a really good windstorm that cranked the antenna, we'd have to make the adjustments in our heads for awhile, but eventually he'd relabel the whole thing.
Perhaps other people's fathers didn't command the TV with quite such esprit, but I seem to recall that people who could drive a stick shift could tune in a TV station and took pride in doing both.
As for modem sounds, my old hometown just got off dial-up recently, and only in the past year have most of them had cable access. Arctic Circle wouldn't puzzle many of the kids back home.
On the other hand, today's Little Dog Lost is really playing to a niche audience. We were emo before anyone else was emo, and that song was the anthem for very serious high school sophomores who knew just how pointless and empty life really was but weren't old enough to read Kafka or Hesse.
And were more angsty than bitter.
If you had to look up "emo," you probably didn't get the vertical hold gag, and vice-versa.
But are you old enough to remember this?
Whatever else has changed at DailyInk/Comics Kingdom, the display is even better than in the past, which was already pretty good. The archivist has a nice collection of Polly and her Pals posted right now, a sample of which is here. Definitely click for the larger image.
This one is from January, 1914, so I kind of doubt you remember it. That's even better: You get to enjoy it for the first time.
I do remember coal furnaces, though if I actually lived with one, I wasn't old enough to remember when it was converted to burn fuel oil. But this is a good time of year for a little nostalgia about that post-conversion era: Delivering coal had generally consisted of a truck coming and dumping it down a chute into your basement, which was a lot less work than the curb service that JW Williams recalled in this 1936 Out Our Way panel:
Not only did we not have to shovel it, since it was no longer being delivered, but, however it had arrived back when it had, enough random pieces had failed to make it into the cellar that, when you wanted to make a snowman, you could poke around the foundation of most houses and find enough coal to make eyes, a nose, a mouth and buttons for his coat.
My grandchildren are of snowman-building-age, but the houses they live in are not of used-to-have-a-coal-furnace age.
Fap! I'm gonna go see what happens if you mix Geritol and Serutan.
And for those old enough to remember mailing cards:
Caitlin McGurk of the Billy Ireland Museum was recently in DC as she prepares to curate the upcoming exhibit of Bill Watterson and Richard Thompson art. Here she is with the latter, who is recovering from hip replacement surgery and whom she reports can be contacted at:
Cherrydale Health & Rehabilitation Center
3710 Lee Hwy Room 511
Arlington, VA 22207
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