By Frances Stebbins, Correspondent
[This is a memory from the many decades the author has been privileged to write for daily and weekly newspapers circulating in Western Virginia.]
The Christmas after newsman husband Charlie died in 2008, our three children gave me a new table television set. They thought that I, being alone in our Salem home, would need something more durable than the old rarely watched appliance to keep from being lonely.
{Parenthetically, I’m skipping writing about the church “season” called Advent here. I’ve done it so many times that if your church has not explained its meaning to you it doesn’t matter.}
I must explain that our family did not get television when most others did in the days when it hit the Roanoke Valley like a tidal wave in the 1950s. Young couples like us, newspaper friends, all became so enamored of the new parlor entertainment that they didn’t want to carry on a conversation when we came to visit. We read newspapers and some books and magazines like “The Saturday Evening Post” and “Life.”
Later, when we had three small children to read to, I did not want them to grow up glued to the TV as many were. My way usually prevailed in our home, so they were 12, 10 and 7 when a small table model finally arrived.
Our daughter, then a pre-teen, as independent of spirit as one might expect having been born on July 4 as a direct descendant of the American patriot Patrick Henry, had several scenes with me over what shows to watch. Our solitary younger son, Harvey, found a diversion when he got home earlier from school.
The TV Charlie and I got lasted for many years. As the children grew up and left home, we rarely watched it. At some point we formed a habit of renting CDs of old movies from the Salem Public Library and viewing them in the evening.
That was after we “downsized” for the first time in our move from Hollins to Salem. Our daughter had re-married and moved to the Deep South by then and our bachelor sons were in the homes they had bought nearby where they got their own sets.
Then my husband died, and it was about this point that the three children purchased the heavy old set for me.
That TV set has just left my home, which in the intervening years changed to a smaller house and yard just around the Salem corner. Two men from the Disabled American Veterans Thrift Store at 2381 Roanoke Boulevard in Salem arrived following my call.
An appointment had been set up two weeks earlier, and in the meantime I collected a dozen compact discs (“CDs”) which I could play only on the obsolete, heavy set. I knew it would likely be the last time I would see several award-winning movies of days gone by, and so I spent some evenings reveling in the films of a bye-gone time. Regrettably, I did not have time for the monumental “Gone With the Wind,” which I found at a yard sale several years ago.
I viewed “How Green Was My Valley,” the beautiful, if nostalgic, tale of a coal mining family in Wales around the turn of the 20th Century. There I appreciated the traditional music score of a people who love to sing.
In 1989, a film starring mostly women and set in relatively recent times in Louisiana, came out. “Steel Magnolias” moved me as much when I watched it again recently as it did over 30 years ago. It’s set in a beauty shop in a Bayou town when a daughter is preparing to be married, and it takes her family and friends through the next several years.
It’s perhaps “a woman’s film” for its cast engages in lots of laughter and tears as they live with their men – or lack thereof – and come together at a time of need.
On the final evening before the pick-up, I managed to see most of the 1956 classic of a remake of “War and Peace” with Audrey Hepburn as the young star and Henry Fonda and Mel Ferrer in the major roles. The tale of Napoleonic times in Russia, which originated with the novelist Leo Tolstoy, requires two cassettes.
Rather than see it to the end, which concerns the attainment of spiritual maturity by the hero played by Fonda, I chose an antique 1932 black and white adaptation of “A Farewell to Arms.” It stars a young Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes, both acclaimed theatrical luminaries later.