Early to Bed

           With that first exciting VCR, there was never a need to record anything late-night, because nothing was on.  In our town we had our choice of three stations--in fact after Educational Television got organized, we had four!  We fiddled with the rabbit ears until I forget -- eleven? midnight? and then a waving black-and-white flag (48 stars) appeared on the screen, and sign-off concluded with a rousing rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
          After which, if you were still up, you could fool around with the horizontal and vertical holds, trying to make that Indian Head test pattern as round as possible.