My husband occasionally shares the story about how he was 11 before he found out that the Wizard of Oz was in color despite having seen it every year of his life. The joy of being a child of the 60s who lived in a world of black-and-white TV.

He’s ten years older than I am, but he was about 15 years up on me, because my family went without a TV entirely from around the time I was three until I turned 10 or so. We had a television for my formative Sesame Street years, but when something shorted in it and it caught fire one day, we just didn’t replace it. My dad glued a picture of Howdy Doody to the picture tube, and its main function was as a very large and extremely heavy flat surface for mail, books, and the other typical detritus that clutters most unclaimed flat surfaces.

So my television experiences were severely curtailed compared with those of my friends. I missed out entirely on the whole Mork and Mindy thing, although I picked up some by osmosis in school. I didn’t know anything about All in the Family, and I was 20 before I saw an episode of Happy Days. To date, I am pretty sure I have viewed exactly one scene of Welcome Back Kotter, and John Travolta was not in it.

My parents were not complete luddites, however. Every Christmas, they would rent a set for a week so I could watch Rudolph and Charlie Brown and they could watch all the college bowl games.

When I was 7 or 8, I started being sent to my grandparents’ house in Virginia for a stint every summer. I always spent the first few days on the trampoline, and would then get a terrible case of heat rash and retreat to the one cool spot in the state as far as I knew, which was the basement. There was a TV down there, but my grandparents didn’t have cable (they might not even have had an antenna,) so pickings were slim and I spent more time reading and listening to records—an interesting mishmash of Disney soundtracks (the Aristocats, 101 Dalmatians) and old comedy (Tom Lehrer and the Bickersons). I know we all sat down there and watched TV at night on more than one occasion, but the only things I really remember seeing were movies of the week and episodes of the Love Boat, which my grandmother and I loved laughing at but left a permanent scowl on my grandfather’s face.

And then, when I was 10, for whatever reason, the clouds parted and my parents got not only a color TV but cable to boot. With HBO! I sat through many airings of Superman before I got bored. I still wasn’t allowed to watch during the day if my parents were around, but during the winters I learned it was time to leave for school after Bozo the Clown helped those kids chuck ping pong balls into buckets for prizes. In the summers, my dad would leave for work and my mom wouldn’t get up til 10 or 11, so I got a lot of syndicated bad TV in those hours: I Dream of Jeannie, and Bewitched, and Hazel. I am pretty sure Alice aired in the mornings too; I can’t imagine when else I would have seen Linda Lavin in that waitress getup.

Color TV is not a big deal now, of course. In fact, my kid routinely turns the color off as a “different take” or so he can watch Star Trek “the way Dad saw it the first time.” It is funny to me; sort of like when my grandma would laugh at me for asking her to show me how to sew instead of just buying the bloody dress. “Civilization advanced so that we don’t HAVE to this!” she would protest when the bobbin thread broke for the 900^th time. I feel sort of the same, but I get where the kid is coming from.