Change happens. I think of my grandparents, who in the early 1900’s didn’t even have a telephone or radio. Their awareness of the world around them was based upon socializing at church, with neighbors and letters written by friends and relatives. Mailing letters cost only a penny in those days around 1900, but the amount of money spent on food and shelter was used with great care beyond our reckoning today. Living as they did until electricity and a telephone became available to them certainly restricted their views on everything that we today take for granted. They were great readers who owned hundreds of books, which were apparently the exception to the money they spent on stricter necessities.
I grew up respecting access to reading material from public libraries that my siblings and I borrowed from our local library that we frequented. Pop culture was extraordinary through television. Our first boob tube was a seven-inch model in 1949 and was amazing to me then, but I was only three years old, so to me it was pure magic. TV was mostly news and programs like Amos and Andy, and The Goldbergs, but being a child, I saw the entertainment almost as magic. The other programs I remember from the early 1950’s are Ding Dong School and Clint Yewel, the weatherman. The new and very effective punishment for us kids became our being sent to our rooms, missing our favorite shows like Howdy Doody.
In some ways, television has separated more than united us as a culture, especially when it comes to politics, but that is inevitable on both sides being viewed so that we can choose one and trash the other. I recall that by the 1960’s, my grandparents had a color TV which was a far cry from their not having even a radio so many years before. I would like to think that TV has united more than divided us as beings of the 21st Century. As someone who will turn 80 on my next birthday, I can say that television has been a more positive thing in my life than a negative, in terms of information and entertainment. Of course, I’m happiest when I have the remote control. JB
About John
About John
John Bolinger was born and raised in Northwest Indiana, where he attended Ball State University and Purdue University, receiving his BS and MA from those schools. Then he taught English and French for thirty-five years at Morton High School in Hammond, Indiana before moving to Colorado, where he resided for ten years before moving to Florida. Besides COME SEPTEMBER, Journey of a High School Teacher, John's other books are ALL MY LAZY RIVERS, an Indiana Childhood, and COME ON, FLUFFY, THIS AIN'T NO BALLET, a Novel on Coming of Age, all available on Amazon.com as paperbacks and Kindle books. Alternately funny and touching, COME SEPTEMBER, conveys the story of every high school teacher’s struggle to enlighten both himself and his pupils, encountering along the way, battles with colleagues, administrators, and parents through a parade of characters that include a freshman boy for whom the faculty code name is “Spawn of Satan,” to a senior girl whose water breaks during a pop-quiz over THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS. Through social change and the relentless march of technology, the human element remains constant in the book’s personal, entertaining, and sympathetic portraits of faculty, students, parents, and others. The audience for this book will certainly include school teachers everywhere, teenagers, parents of teens, as well as anyone who appreciates that blend of humor and pathos with which the world of public education is drenched. The drive of the story is the narrator's struggle to become the best teacher he can be. The book is filled with advice for young teachers based upon experience of the writer, advice that will never be found in college methods classes.
Another of John's recent books is Mum's the Word: Secrets of a Family. It is the story of his alcoholic father and the family's efforts to deal with or hide the fact. Though a serious treatment of the horrors of alcoholism, the book also entertains in its descriptions of the father during his best times and the humor of the family's attempts to create a façade for the outside world. All John's books are available as paperbacks and Kindle readers on Amazon, and also as paperbacks at Barnes & Noble. John's sixth book is, Growing Old in America: Notes from a Codger was released on June 15, 2014. John’s most recent book is a novel titled Resisting Gravity, A Ghost Story, published the summer of 2018
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