For some reason, it seems that many of my memories from when I was a teenager center around the television set. My very first memories of it are from my grandmother's living room back when they still lived on a farm. It was one of those old "box" styles and the reception, as I recall, was very lousy.

It always fascinated me that she watched a soap opera in the afternoon. It just didn't seem like something my grandmother would do, but she enjoyed it and told me about some of the people on the show. I wasn't interested, but still I wondered what made her enjoy something like that.

I didn't really like the upstairs of the farm. It scared me when I was a kid and I tried everything in my power when I stayed with them overnight to be allowed to stay up until they retired for the night. That wasn't to be for a little girl, though, and I had to go to bed early. They enjoyed staying up for the 11 p.m. news and I just would not be able to stay awake that long. So instead I lay in the spare room upstairs and terrorized myself with thoughts of the devil or some other form of monster jumping out of the attic door and coming into that room.

I didn't do the overnight stays too often, so most of my television memories are from the home in which I grew up. Sunday nights, of course, were used to watch the Wonderful World of Disney. I could never miss that little Tinkerbell fairy touching her magic wand to the castle to make the "fireworks." It was always quite a disappointment if the movie that was offered for the week turned out to be something I would not enjoy.

Sometime during those very "old days" I started making a habit out of not missing Gilligan's Island on Saturday nights. Gilligan's Island and a bowl of potato chips started many Saturday nights for me. I have to smile now to realize I was too young to question why all of those people took so many things along for just a three hour tour. I never questioned why Mr. Howell had trunks of money along with him, or Ginger had so many gowns on that short tour. Today I'd have to question if they actually planned to get shipwrecked and tried to escape the real world, but not back then, no way, never occurred to me.

After school is another memory. A lot of my friends had figured out that if homework was done immediately after getting home, the rest of the night was free. Not I! The most important thing when arriving home was trying to get to the television dial before any of my siblings got there. No remotes to lose or fight over back then!

Saturday morning, of course, was cartoon time for my younger siblings. I was usually the first one awake but by the time I got the television turned on, they heard it and were right there with me. Luckily we liked the same cartoons and I didn't mind watching that programming with them.