Goodbye, old television.

One of the items I agreed to part with this past weekend was my (somewhat infamous) old 13″ television.

I received this thirteen inch Emerson television for Christmas one year back when I was fourteen or fifteen years old, making it around 25 years old.

Before I owned this television, I had a small TV tuner box that plugged into my Commodore monitor and allowed it to double as a television. It had an antenna and was not cable-ready. After getting this TV, my buddy Jeff and I split the cable connection up in my attic and added a coaxial cable connection in the wall of my bedroom, giving me the ability to watch cable television in my room.

When I moved out and got my own apartment, this television moved with me. Andy and I used to watch Tuesday Night Fights (boxing) every week on it. Our apartment was next door to Kaleidoscope Video on the south side of Oklahoma City, and we used to walk over, rent VHS movies, and watch them on this television. Jeff, Andy and I also spent quite a bit of time playing Nintendo games on it.

One night while messing around in the apartment, the remote control got broken in half. Jeff was able to solder a few parts of it back together, which made it to where about three buttons worked. Everything else required use of the buttons on the front of the television.

This particular model had an odd “feature”. Every time the unit lost power, it lost all its channels. To remind you that this had occurred, the channel number would display so big that it took up 2/3 of the screen. The first time we lost power in the apartment, we realized that the “set channel” button was only available on the remote and not on the front of the television. For the next several years, any time I tried to watch television, the channel number would be on there taking up the majority of the screen. I specifically remember playing Mortal Kombat on that television and hiding behind the giant “3” in the middle of the screen. Call it “home field advantage”.

When I moved out of that apartment, the television again went with me, this time to Weatherford when I started going to college there. I think it was while we were living there that Susan spent the $75 and bought me a new remote. No “universal remote” would work with it, so she had to order a replacement remote from Emerson, which if I recall cost about $75. This has become a (joking) point of contention between the two of us. Susan says that, if we ever split up, she gets to keep the remote. I contend that the remote was a gift, and therefore I get to keep it (especially being the owner of the television.)

This old TV (and new remote) made the trip from Weatherford (in 1993) back to OKC, and then to El Reno. Susan owned a larger television (a 19″ model, I think) that became our living room television, but this Emerson one was always in our bedroom. When I moved to Spokane, Washington and could (originally) only take one car load worth of items, this TV went with me. For the month or so I was living by myself in Spokane I would sit on the floor on a big foam floppy chair, eat Ramen Noodles out of the pot, and watch TV on this little guy to pass the time.

It’s a little hard to make out, but you can see the black TV poking out from in between my computer monitors in this picture. This was in 1997.

In 1998, when Susan and I moved back to Oklahoma, the TV also made the trek. I used it at our old house in my office. We also used it briefly in our current house, before my Dad bought me a 24″ television to put in my game room. At that point the 13″ Emerson was relegated to life in the garage. That was around 2002, and it’s been sitting out there gathering dust ever since.

Part of the theme of this move is “letting go,” and so with a heavy heart, I donated this television off to Goodwill.

(I kept the remote.)