[Speed Gibson,
Tuesday December 27, 2005 at 11:15am]
Monday Night Football ends on ABC
Tonight is the 555th and last broadcast of ABC's Monday Night Football. I was in college when the first one aired in 1970. I've been around for them all. For that matter, I remember the first games of the Twins and the Vikings. I've seen every Super Bowl, including those four awful drubbings. There's no getting around it. I'm getting old!
This got my thinking back to life before the Twins, when I would seek out baseball games on my old Philco-style vacuum tube radio. It was an antique even then, and I should have hung on to it. It had just two wooden knobs, on/off/volume and tuning. The back was open. You could reach in and get quite a jolt as the big power triode had its plate connection coming off the top. I didn't, but I could have.
I marveled how I could pick up KOA in Denver after dark to listen to the play by play of the Denver Bears, a minor league team. That radio was a flying carpet that took me to Little Rock, Omaha, Cleveland, Des Mointes, New Orleans, Denver, Seattle, and many more.
Then came the portable transistor radios, with the number of transistors and diodes proudly embossed on the cover. But it wasn't the same. That old radio had the magic. I turned it on, and a soft hum came from the speaker, kind of like a fog. After 20 seconds or so, the tubes were warm enough so that the program could emerge from that foggy hum.
Like I said, I should have hung on to it.
This got my thinking back to life before the Twins, when I would seek out baseball games on my old Philco-style vacuum tube radio. It was an antique even then, and I should have hung on to it. It had just two wooden knobs, on/off/volume and tuning. The back was open. You could reach in and get quite a jolt as the big power triode had its plate connection coming off the top. I didn't, but I could have.
I marveled how I could pick up KOA in Denver after dark to listen to the play by play of the Denver Bears, a minor league team. That radio was a flying carpet that took me to Little Rock, Omaha, Cleveland, Des Mointes, New Orleans, Denver, Seattle, and many more.
Then came the portable transistor radios, with the number of transistors and diodes proudly embossed on the cover. But it wasn't the same. That old radio had the magic. I turned it on, and a soft hum came from the speaker, kind of like a fog. After 20 seconds or so, the tubes were warm enough so that the program could emerge from that foggy hum.
Like I said, I should have hung on to it.