The Crooked TV Story

                                                              The Crooked TV Story

                                                                        1964

                                                                  A true story

                                           Written 12/29/2011 and rewritten 02/04/2016

                                                                 Howard Yasgar

In 1964, I was living in Hialeah Florida.

It was in 1963, when I had been asked to come to Florida by a friend that was leasing an auto wrecking yard in North West Miami, and he suspected that the manager was stealing from him..

So he asked me to come to Miami and find out what was going on.

What I found out was not so good, so my friend ended up closing the place down.

However once my wife and I found out how nice it was in Florida, we decided to stay.

My father had passed away in 1961, back in Connecticut and my mother had needed a change of scenery so she had moved to Florida.

At the time of this story my mom was renting a room at the Cadillac Hotel on Miami Beach.

One day my mother called me and said that one of her friends who was also living in the Cadillac hotel was liquidation all her furniture as she was returning to New York.

So we drove down to the Cadillac Hotel and she showed us all her worn out, and well used furniture.

Just as we were getting ready to leave the women said that she had more furniture in storage in the hotel basement. We didn’t want to appear rude, so we agreed to take a look at it.

As I had expected, it was mostly a bunch of worn out crap that no one else wanted.

However, there was a thirteen inch black and white television mounted on a brass colored metal wire stand.

I asked my mothers friend if the television worked.

She said, it worked perfectly, it was there in the basement because she had replaced it with a larger model.

She only wanted forty dollars for it, so I looked around but there was no place to plug it in to see if it worked.

Well, the lady appeared to be an honest person so we bought the TV and stand.

Once we got home, I immediately plugged it in, and sure enough it worked.

The only problem was that the picture was crooked, it was higher on the right side by about three inches.

I had always heard that you could fix this type of problem by moving the copper coil that was on the picture tube inside the set.

So I took the rear cover off the television. However, once I looked inside, there was a warning label. So I decided I didn’t want to stick my hand in there and get some kind of a high voltage shock.

I then put the TV back together again, and I placed a small cardboard box under the right side of the set to level out the picture, it really looked pretty stupid, and nobody in the house wanted to look at it.

Now, whenever I was driving in my old neighborhood where the auto wrecking yard was, out of curiosity I always looked to see if there was someone new renting the place.

The auto wrecking business had now been vacant for over a year.

One day, I saw several cars parked there. So I pulled in to meet the new tenants. They were three Cuban fellows and they spoke some English, so I introduced myself telling them that I had come to Florida a year or so before to manage that very wrecking yard, but unfortunately the owner had to close it down.

The three fellows said they had come down to Miami from New Jersey, and they had just rented the property. They said, that they were all sleeping on the floor in the office, it was all temporary until they got the business up and running.

Then they asked me where they could buy a cheap Television set.     

I told them that I had a nice thirteen inch black and white TV that worked fine, the only problem was that the picture was a little crooked.

Two of the fellows told me in English and in Spanish that a crooked picture was an easy thing to fix. They said, all you had to do was take the back off the TV and turn the magnetic coils located on the back of the picture tube.

They said they could fix the TV in five minutes.

So I sold them the crooked TV for the same forty dollars that I had paid for it, and I kept the TV stand.

I never heard another word from them, so I assumed they had fixed the television.

About a year passed by and I saw the wrecking yard was closed again, and the three Cubans were gone.  

About another two years passed, and one day my family decided we should go and get a pizza from a pizza store located downtown on East 4th Avenue in Hialeah.

We had always joked about the Pizza store because it was owned by a grizzly old guy who wasn’t Italian.

We hadn’t been to the Pizza place in a couple of years, and we hoped that he was still there.

As we walked into the store, the first thing I saw was on a shelf in the back, he had a 13 inch black and white television with a crooked picture, and he had put three books under the right side to make the picture level.

We couldn’t stop laughing.

I should have told him all he needed to do was remove the back of the TV and adjust the coils on the picture tube.

It was an easy fix.