Voting in the sixties (an addled reminisence from AlextheKay)

 My daughter and I were watching Rachel Maddow the other day, when Maddow startled us with the claim that the competing Trump and Biden town halls had happened before--in 1960.  That year, the very night before voting day, both Nixon and Kennedy spoke to telephone callers on competing channels.

Nope, not the same thing.  Not at all.  

I startled my daughter by explaining that we didn't have instant reruns back then.  You picked which would-be prexy to watch and you missed the other one.  And it wasn't rerun in the middle of the night because the TV channels shut down at 2 A.M.

"Wait, what?" my daughter asked.  "Why would they shut down?"

Well, to show us this, of course!


Then I explained that there were only three stations.  And that if you missed a show, you missed the show.  You might get another chance to see it in the Summer.  IF it was rerun at all.  

And the news was half an hour long.  Period.  

But you could always wake up at six in the morning to watch the farm report!

We're living in the golden age of television, folks.  We not only have umpty-zillion channels, we can tivo whatever we like, stream it off the internet or just plain steal it by torrenting.  We can watch twelve shows that are broadcast simultaneously!  

And the drawback is that we CAN watch both presidential contenders, if we're obsessive enough.

Do you miss the old days?


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