Good stuff but after a while I decided that I wanted something more — my own TV — and I began haunting second-hand shops until I finally found one I could afford, priced low because it wasn't in working condition. It was a medium-sized table model, and when the guy at the store plugged it in and turned it on, it had sound but no picture.

After I got it home, I took off the back and turned it on again, trying to see if all the vacuum tubes were lit up, which was the first thing you did with those sets. Then if you could see a dark one, you'd pull it, then take it down and try it in the tube tester in the hardware store or the variety store.

A lot of stores had those units, which I suppose were some kind of franchise operation. You could test your tube for free and if it was bad, then of course they'd sell you a replacement. Unfortunately, sometimes you couldn't find a dark tube in your set so you'd have to pull them all out and take them in for testing. (Luckily, most sets had a little diagram on the back panel to help you when it came time to put them back.) My memory is a little fuzzy, but I think I just needed one tube replaced and bingo, I had a working TV. It had a small screen with a faded picture in shades of gray, but to me it was great and I fell asleep in front of it a lot of nights. (By the way, I don't recall my parents ever restricting my viewing, as long as I kept the volume low.)

I soon developed some favorite shows and one of those remains pretty vivid in my memory, probably because of the fantasies it created in my teenage mind. It was a show called Adventures In Paradise, based loosely (very) on Michenor's book, and starring a guy named Gardner McKay. He probably could have had a big career as a leading man but pretty much turned all that down, eventually becoming a very successful playwright and novelist.

The show was about a good-looking young guy who had his own schooner based in Tahiti, and sailed around the Pacific carrying a little cargo and some passengers (often attractive women) from port to port. Was there ever a TV show more made to order for a teenager who was still trying to figure out what he was going to do with his life? I'd watch enthralled every week as it allowed me to forget — at least for an hour — the daily pressures that high-schoolers have always faced, even in those days.

Instead, I could lose myself in paradise, as Jerry Byrd's theme song immersed me in the feel of the South Pacific, complete with squawking seagulls and the splash of waves. I could almost smell the ocean... that is, you know, if I'd had any idea what an ocean smelled like.