the latest in consumer electronics, the television. His favorite (only) son will wait until ‘54 to be born.
The family story is that my newlywed parents had a bed, two orange crates to sit on, and a TV my father had built. It was supposed to be the only one on the block, though I guess that changed after a while.
The earliest television I remember was a huge console in our suburban living room around 1960; by that time my father had gone through a few TV-related jobs before becoming an electronics technician at the Philly Naval Base. In '62 we got our first color TV, an RCA console. It was in '67 that we moved to Japan, when my father got a three-year contract to work at Yokosuka Naval Base; we took the console with us.
Until 9/11 when I learned what it was like to hate a scurrilous attacking enemy, I never understood what it took for my father to live in Japan and work among the people who had been his sworn enemies only a generation earlier. But he gave his lifetime protecting America from its sworn enemies, even when those enemies reversed positions and he had to work with the former enemies against what had supposedly been the former friends.