RIVER CITY JOURNAL: WINDOW TV VIEWING BRINGS FLASHBACK

Flashbacks aren't your style. It is seldom you are overwhelmed with sudden memories. Your memories are thoughtful and well-tended. You don't even like flashbacks in movies. Too hard to follow the plot. And life's plot is tough enough without flashbacks.

Imagine, then, what it must be like to drive down Broadway in the early evening and see a large-screen television set in a store window. And the TV is on.

You can see a large-screen TV from about two blocks' distance, in case you are interested in key shopping data. In your living room, a really big TV must look like a drive-in theater screen. You wouldn't know. The only large-screen TVs you see are in restaurants and the den of a Topeka friend where you learned to eat chili and cinnamon rolls whilst watching a Jayhawks basketball game. But that is another story.

The flashback.

You thought a certain column writer had a memory lapse, didn't you?

Seeing the TV playing in the store window transported you, as if propelled by a laser-quick time machine, to the sidewalk in front of Luna's Hardware in your Ozarks hometown. The time warp was about 40 years to a time when electricity was new on remote valley farms and TV sets were coveted furniture.

Luna's knew how to get the attention of prospective TV customers. The store put a display behind the big plate-glass windows, and every night (well, maybe not Sunday night, because no store wanted to let Ed Sullivan interfere with evening church services) the TV in the window was left on for passers-by to watch.

But that isn't all.

The store rigged up a speaker on the outside of the window so you could plainly hear the evening's programs broadcast by KFVS-TV right here in Cape Girardeau. There wasn't much choice. Channel 12 was the only channel whose signal made it into that part of the Ozarks.

It was pretty exciting to go to town on Wednesday evening for piano lessons (which coordinated time-wise with prayer meeting and choir practice) and then run downtown to join the crowd in front of Luna's to watch the programs.

Standing on a sidewalk watching television isn't done much any more. People don't get out of their air-conditioned homes or from in front of their own TVs much, except for softball or maybe once a year to go to the fair. In front of Luna's, with the speaker blaring "I Love Lucy," everybody was family, and you shared a bond that comes from being together in the same place at the same time with the same purpose: watching a TV set whose reception was so snowy at times that it was more like listening to radio -- but you watched anyway, because it was TV.

You stopped running downtown from piano practice when Mrs. Handford, your piano teacher, got a TV. You soon started arriving early for your lesson before the previous student was finished. "That's OK," you would say. "I'll just watch `Sea Hunt' until you're finished."

Eventually your family got a TV at the farm. How quickly the world changes. It was only a couple of short years between oil lamps and "The Millionaire" in the living room.

Luna's Hardware is gone now. So is Gayle Mercantile and Steward's Toggery and the Richardson Hotel and the Melinda Theater. Toney's Drug Store is still there, though, but they don't have any TVs.

Whoosh! Back to the present, standing on a sidewalk in front of a store on Broadway, watching a big-screen TV. The star's nose is bigger than a Volkswagen. That is what 40 years will do to you.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.