My weekly airing of Alf was coming on and I was 14 years old at the time. My dad, an ex firefighter and dispatcher had his trusty scanner relaxing in his favorite easy chair and the call came down at 8pm - a massive fire was happening downtown. We all scrambled out of the house excitedly to go “chase” the fire. It was his favorite past time to relive the old days of firefighting and boy this was the fire of all fires for him!
So, we drove downtown to where it was, about 2 blocks away, you could see the flames shooting out of the 5 story brick building and the closer you got to it, the hotter the heat was. We found a place to park and watched the firefighters do their best. By now, the fire was melting the lamp poles across the street and everyone had to move away from the intense heat. Firefighters turned to surrounding buildings and sprayed water on the old post office, library and other historic buildings to keep them cool and wet against the embers. Sometime later during that time, the entire side of the building collapsed in the street blanketing anything below in red hot bricks. Later on that night, the news showed footage and didn’t bleep out the “Oh Shit!” comment from the camera man filming it.
More about the fire here: (Sorry, it’s a very small entry for them) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medford_Hotel
Unfortunately, the archive that would have the most information no longer exists, the local news paper closed down earlier this year and took the site with it.
The story goes, they tracked down the source of the fire to a torch accidentally setting the building ablaze. For the years prior to this, it was an old historic Hotel and was being renovated to be converted for low income housing. During this process, they think someone set a hot torch down and wasn’t thinking about the safety at the time and that’s all it took to light up the old wood and materials inside.
For a while longer after that, the shell of the building stayed in place while they rebuilt the building with brick and matched it to the original look.
push buttons? double digit LED!? whoa whoa whoa slow down there Rockefeller!! We had knobs/dials and rabbit ears. And we liked it. By gum if you wanted to watch something else you’d get your lazy ass out of the chair and walk over to the tv, turn the dial, and then fiddle with the antenna until the static was down to a manageable level.
I remember when the TV was first purchased, it was in 1984 around July 4th. My parents had this thing of once a year, splurging on a new item, that year, it was this TV like none other, $400 was the cost and it was super cool for us a kids. The following year, was a VCR and after that, a nice Realistic Stereo Rack System from Radio Shack. Later on in life, the expenditures got nicer, then stopped after a while.
I do remember the days of getting up, rotating the VHF channel selector, trying to fine tune it on the fancier models and then adjusting the rabbit ears. And darned if I wasn’t the one who did it being the youngest! And I had the knack of getting the signal right, but as soon as I walked away…the signal clarity went! So, I guess I acted as a good antenna. Oh yeah - we only had 3 channels, PBS, CBS and NBC if we were on a good day, otherwise, PBS it seemed.
Getting Cable TV Was something special, but not nearly as special as going to the video store and renting a VHS. Remember kids : “Be Kind -Please Rewind” !