High Flight

Remember when there wasn't cable?
Remember when there weren't all night
info-mercials? At some apointed time
of night, the local broadcast station
would call it a day and shut-down the
station and let the tubes cool, or go
to a test pattern. I've always been a
night owl, even as a kid. I saw this
moment quite a bit. Most stations would
play a vid of the national anthem at
sign-off. Sometimes, one of the other
patriotic songs. If I was very lucky,
they would do the poem; High Flight,
with scenes of an F104 Starfighter
flying through the clouds. It was
always a patrio-ligeos moment for me.
I found this copy of High Flight in my
dad's papers long ago, and hung it on
the wall. Now that I've scanned it for
this post, it's going back on the wall
for the first time in years.