Exploding GE Color TVs, 1960s

[Pete Deksnis]

As a guy who made a living for many years arranging letters of the alphabet on paper, I cringe sometimes at what my fellow editors have allowed to pass under the guise of reason masked by a word of admonition.

Consider the article veg-o-matic found: Forty-three years ago a house fire in a Deal, NJ home -- which by happenstance is two miles from where I write this bit -- was made by the NY Times to 'appear' as though a TV picture tube blew up and started a deadly fire. Check the fourth word in the article: 'apparently'. It is a way to make the entire article legal but, because of its location, quickly forgotten in the mini avalanche of negative news that follows about the fire and its victims. One easily leaves with the impression that an exploding television picture tube blew up and started a fire where people died. Gruesome. Bad TV set.

But television cathode ray tubes can implode in a fire. Maybe that's what actually happened. How can we know what happened forty-three years ago?

I wasn't there.

Maybe the "...explosion-like sound" reported in the NY Times was an exploding bottle of potable flammable liquid that ended up feeding the fire. I wasn't there.

Were you?

Don't be too quick to put faith in words you read. (paranoid persons excluded of course :-)