{"id":121,"date":"2010-05-16T15:57:47","date_gmt":"2010-05-16T22:57:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theagingofaquarius.com\/dw_blog\/?p=121"},"modified":"2010-05-16T16:32:19","modified_gmt":"2010-05-16T23:32:19","slug":"tv-commercials","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theagingofaquarius.com\/dw_blog\/tv-commercials\/","title":{"rendered":"My dad, the inventor"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nearly sixty years ago my dad did something that seems pretty goofy now, but at the time we were all amazed and impressed. He was very proud of himself.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This was back in the fifties when TV was black-and-white, we only had two or three channels and a huge number of American households didn’t even have a TV yet. Nobody had more than one. That would have been as silly and pointless as having two cars!<\/p>\n

TV commercials in those days seem quaintly funny in retrospect. Some seem flat-out unbelievable. Click here and check this out:<\/p>\n

“More doctors smoke Camels than any <\/strong><\/a>other cigarette!”<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a>The commercials annoyed my dad. Not the messages themselves, just the fact that there were any. He thought all TV programs should be absolutely free. I don’t know if he ever considered why anybody would bother to create them if they were.<\/p>\n

I don’t think it bothered him much that his favorite program, The Gillette Cavalcade of Sports,<\/a> was presented by the Gillette Safety Razor company. Boxing was purely formatted and made sense: three minutes of two guys trying to kill each other followed by a one minute commercial and then back to the fight.<\/p>\n

I think Dad felt that having us watch a commercial in that situation was more a matter of respecting the fighters’ private dignity than commercialism. I think he also figured — as an afterthought — it was better that his six-year-old son watch an Old Spice commercial<\/a> rather than be subjected to the between-rounds visuals of two guys sweating, bleeding and spitting teeth into a bucket while receiving one minute of facial reconstructive surgery as fat men yelled at them before they go back out to resume the effort to kill or be killed.<\/p>\n

Dad was sensitive like that.<\/p>\n

Incongruous as it seems now, any of these commercials might have popped up between fight rounds. I remember them all:<\/p>\n

“Bosco gives me iron, and sunshine vitamin D!”<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

But Dad seemed to think that TV commercials were essentially the same thing as somebody intruding on our private home life. It was almost as if John Cameron Swayze<\/a> or George Fenneman<\/a> were making a habit of walking right into our living room every few minutes and interrupting our evening’s family entertainment.<\/p>\n

So, what did he do? <\/strong><\/p>\n

My dad invented the MUTE switch!<\/strong><\/p>\n

I kid you, not.<\/a><\/p>\n

Decades before the invention of TiVo and the insufferable mysteries of universal remote control units, my dad attached a long cord to one end of our TV’s speaker through the rear of the console. The other end was attached to a simple two-position plastic switch that allowed him to click the sound on and off at will!<\/p>\n

Sure, we still had to watch and wait for the commercials to end but we didn’t have to actually listen to stuff like this…<\/p>\n

“That’s a woman for ya! I ask her to get my shirts whiter… “<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a9 2010 by David L. Williams, all rights reserved<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nearly sixty years ago my dad did something that seems pretty goofy now, but at the time we were all amazed and impressed. He was very proud of himself. 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