Westerns Theater

I remember when I was very young in the early 1960’s, my dad met a stranger who was new to our town. From the beginning, Dad was fascinated with this enchanting newcomer, and soon invited him to live with our family. The stranger was quickly accepted in our home.

As I grew up I never questioned his place in our family. Our family consisted of – My older Brother, younger sister, I, My parents who were our guides in everyday life and the stranger, who was our storyteller. He could weave the most fascinating stories. Tales of the Old West, Adventures, Mysteries and Funny Stories. He could hold our whole family spell bound for hours each evening.

He seemed to know everything about politics, history, or science. He proclaimed to know all things about the past, understand the present, and seemingly could predict the future. Quite the artist his pictures so life like that I would often laugh or cry at what I saw.

Always the incessant talker he was like a friend to the whole family. All of us were enthralled with his stories of faraway places.

My parents ruled our household with certain moral convictions. The Storyteller seemed to honor all our houses rules at first. But as the years went by into the 1970’s he seemed to feel less obligation to honor them. Profanity, for example, was not allowed in our house. Not from us, from our friends, or adults. Our longtime visitor, however, started using the occasional four letter words and the pictures he started showing became very suggestive at times. I could tell this made my parents squirm. But to my knowledge he was never confronted.

Also many years after the storyteller entered our home sometime in the 1980’s He began to talk very freely about promiscuity. His comments at first were just suggestive, then he became more blatant and sometimes very embarrassing. I know now that my early concepts of the man-woman relationship were influenced by his stories.

Sometime in the 1990’s he started to feel like we needed exposure to even more things and he decided there was no such thing as immorality so he told us of other life styles we would have never imagined. Now the Storyteller seemed to make it a point to violate our old household moral convictions with every new story he told.

As I look back, I believe it was by the Grace of God that the storyteller did not influence us more. Time after time he opposed the values of my parents. Yet he was seldom rebuked and never asked to leave.

More than fifty years have passed since I met the storyteller. Now he is known world wide and is always ready for someone to listen to him talk and look at his pictures. Since the early 2000’s he is very free with what he says and the pictures he shows. There seems to be nothing sacred to him these days but the majority of people who know him do not seem to mind.

His name? We always just called him T.V.

Author Unknown

(This his an interesting take on what has happened to television and how the slow change has desensitized society. The younger people of today do not remember a time when T.V. programs had many rules to obey)