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Last week I had the good fortune of winning a 32" Dynex HD flat screen television in yet another drawing. Over the years the cost of flat screens have gone down immensely, and my new TV can now be found online for $259.00.
My point is this: if anyone is interested in buying a big, bulky and heavy RCA 27" television, let me know. I'll even help you carry it down my staircase.
Actually, that's not really my point, but this is:
Back in the 1950's, when my father worked as a photographer for the United States Information Agency, he was assigned to (then) Senator Richard Milhous Nixon. During their travels the two became friends, and the friendship lasted well into Nixon's Presidency. In his later years, when my father was asked what Presidents' administrations were the most memorable to work for, Dad always said the Kennedy administration was the most interesting, but working under President Nixon was the best.
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- Senator Nixon and Dad. The original photograph is signed by Nixon, thanking my dad for taking over 3,000 photographs of him.
Dad often enjoyed telling a story about a conversation he had with Richard Nixon:
The two were talking about technology—perhaps the latest camera model, or sending a man to the moon—and Nixon told Dad, "Joe, someday there will be two cars in the driveway of every home, and every home will have two televisions, and those televisions will be thin enough to hang on a wall, just like a painting."
Of course Dad thought this was a bunch of bullshit—or as he would say, hokum. Why on earth would any family need two cars? And two televisions in every home? What's the purpose?
Then one summer day in 1985, Dad came home from work and threw the latest issue of Popular Science on the kitchen table where I was sitting and eating a Pop-Tart.
"You see!" Dad exclaimed while tapping the magazine, "Nixon was right!"
Indeed, Nixon's prediction for the future had become a reality.
Dad didn't live long enough to see flat screen televisions become so popular. These types of TVs were around in 2007—the year my dad died—but I doubt he ever remembered seeing one because Alzheimer's Disease is a bitch, and don't let anyone try to tell you otherwise.
Here's another interesting story about Nixon, one that I saw the other day on the Discovery Channel:
Outgoing President Lyndon Johnson was leaving office, and he gave the incoming President Richard Nixon some advice.
"When your Presidency is over," Johnson told him, "you're going to want to write a memoir and sell it as a book. Trust me on this, you'll forget a lot of stuff during your time as President, so be sure to record everything on tape... and I mean everything."
Of course Nixon did as Johnson suggested, and a few years later Nixon's Presidency came to an abrupt end when his Watergate tape recordings were discovered.
It was a disappointing and devastating culmination for Nixon, but at the time, the American people didn't know about his talent for predicting things yet to come—like two cars being in every garage, and two flat screen televisions being in every home. And sadly, Nixon was unable to predict his own future.
According to Dad though, Tricky Dick was a great man.
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FiN.
