Destroyed a book case today. Just trying to make room in Our Little Red House.

It wasn’t a for-real book case. It was an entertainment center. We used to have these back in the seventies and eighties; no idea if they still make them now. They came in all sizes and shapes but were all, basically, huge book cases big enough to hold your television set, your VCR, all your stereo components, and still have room left over for you to stash your collection of LP records, cassette tapes and video tapes, CDs, your dozen or so remote controls and all their batteries, living and dead.

A little history for readers under thirty:

Television sets before flat-screens came along got fatter as they got wider. A TV wider than twenty inches was at least fourteen inches deep and weighed so much that there are news stories of them literally killing people who were unlucky enough have one tip over and fall on them. So thank you, flat-screen television sets, for not only giving us bigger, better pictures, but also for not killing us. We really appreciate that.

If you’re under thirty, your parents probably had VCRs. You might even have had one. They were never all that much bigger than they were when they finally passed the baton to DVD players. What took up a whole lot of room were the tapes. The tapes were big as books and held maybe two hours of video, so collecting every episode of your favorite TV series and movie franchises required that you set aside a pretty significant chunk of household real estate to shelve hundreds of book-sized tapes. If you go visit your local library next weekend, you might still be able to see what a collection of hundreds of books looks like, unless you live in a big city where libraries have mostly thrown out all their books to make room for coffee bars.

Kids, I don’t know how you do it now, but back when I was in high school we bragged about the size of our stereo components the way our fathers bragged about the size of the engines in their cars, if that helps. Oh, you could buy stereo systems that were all packaged as a single unit, but a decent stereo set had to be pieced together from components, starting with a honkin’ big amp. The bigger and heavier the amp was, the more awesome it was. To get just a little bit technical about it, if your buddy had an amp that pushed any less than 450 watts of power to the speakers, you took him aside and told him, as gently as you knew how, that he had to step up his game. Then you had to have a belt-drive turntable with a diamond stylus and a floating tone arm; a cassette recorder/player that could produce four-channel Dolby-quality sound; and an AM/FM stereo receiver with a fine-tuning knob, analogue, of course, although we didn’t call it that back then.

I can’t even talk about LP records yet without breaking out in tears. I could say they were the most wonderful way to enjoy recorded music ever devised by the mind of humankind, but that would only scratch the surface of the vinyl. (Too bad you’ll never know what that means.) If you’ve never heard a top-notch LP recording played through a fine stereo component system, you have no conception of what a truly magnificent music experience can be.

We used to pile all this stuff up in a big stack, or on milk crates, or really creative people used to build shelves by stacking cinder blocks with pine boards between them to create a Bohemian-looking book shelf. (That’s probably racist now; don’t repeat that in mixed company.) Eventually, somebody in the mass-produced furniture business realized that if he made an extra-wide book case with shelves twelve to fifteen inches deep, he could sell it as a stereo component holder, or “entertainment center,” and somebody else made one of the openings in the shelves extra tall and extra wide to hold a television set.

Your Unka Dave is making all of this up as he goes along. You realize that, don’t you?

We had one of these entertainment center things for years. My Darling B bought it before she met me, and after we married, we carted it all around the world at least twice until we settled here in our Little Red House, where we kept it until we bought a flat-screen TV that we hung on the wall. It was just in the way after that, especially after we shoved it into the spare room where it sat for months until this weekend. We offered it to Tim, who has, I think, three or four pieces of furniture to his name, but he took one look at it and said, Oh, Hell No. So yesterday I moved all the LPs and DVDs and electronic components off it, and today I hit it with a hammer until all the pieces came apart, then stashed the pieces in the basement. I’ll eventually cut up the pieces and turn them into much smaller, more useful shelves. But it was nice while it lasted