In 1923, a former telegrapher turned electrician turned up in Bisbee, Arizona, with a wife named Esther and $34.00 in his pocket. No one knew that broke young man would turn out to be one of the town’s most successful entrepreneurs. From that humble beginning he created not one but two separate radio stations, KSUN in Bisbee and KAPR in Douglas. Some thirty years later in 1953, he brought television to town.

TV may have been more common in the rest of the country, but not in Bisbee. The signals couldn’t get over the barrier formed by the Mule Mountains. So Mr. Morris set about fixing that. He built a tower on Juniper Flats, the highest point in the Mules, and then created a cable network. My parents didn’t sign up immediately due to cost considerations. I seem to remember it cost $7.00 a month, but with nine mouths to feed, every cent counted. I believe wanting to watch I Love Lucy was what finally got them to knuckle under.

At the time there were three channels. Art Linkletter came on around noon. After school we watched Uncle Mac whose job it was to introduce the films on offer—The Little Rascals and The Three Stooges. On Sundays we watched Dinah Shore and Ed Sullivan. There was no such thing as recording. If you missed a show, you missed it. As for changing the channel? That’s what kids were for, and heaven knows Norman and Evie had plenty of those!

Then time passed—lots of it, and things changed with it. By the time Norman and Evie were in their eighties, (which is where Bill and I are now) my father’s eyes would get tired. As a result, when they were watching TV in the evenings, Evie would turn down the volume so he could keep his eyes closed and rest them during the commercials and then Evie would turn the sound back up once the commercial was over. That was in the nineties. Were there remotes back then? I think so, and my mother was definitely in charge of it.

As I said, Bill and I are now both in our eighties. I’ve described our family room before. His chair—a self-rising recliner—is on the right. My writing chair is on the left. We now live in a time when remotes are … well … pretty much universal. We’re both right handed. When he dozes off in front of the television set with the remote under his right hand, that device could just as well be on the moon. I can raise or lower or mute the volume by yelling at our Sonos Sound system, but if I want to change the channel? Nope. I could go over to his chair and bodily remove the clicker from under his hand, but that does two things: It wakes him up and then he wants to finish watching whatever he was watching in the first place.

Last week I had an epiphany. What would happen if we had TWO remotes? And now we have them—one for him and one for me. When he’s sound asleep with his hand on the switch as he is right now, I can watch whatever I want without disturbing him in the least.

I haven’t felt this empowered since 1960 when my dad, perched on the floorboard of the passenger seat in his new Plymouth Valiant, taught me how to operate a stick shift.

Yikes, I guess that means I really am getting old!