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Growing up in my house on Third Avenue in Altoona, it's safe to say that things could get quite loud on many occasions. In fact, the seven homes that housed some form of a Franco could conjure up noise that could challenge the sound barrier.
I tell you this because the sound level created by my two boys when they are playing video games at home nowadays could force Blair Township officials to create a noise ordinance just for them.
And they're not even in the same room when it's done, but we'll get to that soon enough.
But first, let's step into the time machine. You better put your headphones on to protect your ears.
My brother, Tom, and I would play sports games all the time … well … at least when we weren't doing school work. OK, I'll rephrase that, when Tom wasn't doing school work. He's a doctor now. I am not. So obviously, I wasn't doing as much school work as Tom was back in the day.
Because my dad wanted to hear the intricacies of the plots of "Cannon" and "Barnaby Jones" on a nightly basis, we were relegated to the kitchen table to play either electric football, table top ice hockey, that ping pong basketball game or, for a time while it was in use, a version of electric baseball (which was not good).
Because we did our own play-by-play during games, there may have been a tendency to yell during certain portions. If any of you remember the "Saturday Night Live" skit called "The Loud Family" with Tom Hanks you get the idea.
In fact, I am pretty sure I could get my lawyer friend, Mike Sosnowski, to help me sue the producers of that show. My brother and I were "The Loud Family."
Of course, because parts of our games would break, we had to make due with what was around the house. There was no asking to order spare parts. If we did, our parents would turn us into spare parts.
So when the bottoms of the tabletop ice hockey game would break, Tom and I would use whatever we could to make the board level. Cookbooks, telephone books, oven mitts … whatever we could get our hands on, and because we were young, we didn't put anything back.
So, if my mom came looking for a cookbook, depending on what sports season it was, we could tell her whether or not we were the culprits.
It didn't matter how far my mom and dad would move us around the house, upstairs to our room or upstairs into the attic where my brother, John, stayed, we just got louder and louder. It was like a challenge.
Which brings me to my two boys, who play video games mostly … no entirely … and they do it in separate rooms, and it bugs the heck out of me, but not my wife.
One night I was home, and I heard them yelling at each other, no correct that, I heard them screaming at each other over one of their games. I thought to myself, "Why are they screaming at each other when they are in the same room?"
They were not in the same room.
One plays downstairs on a big TV, while the other plays in his bedroom on a regular-size TV. Evidently, you can't play these games in the same room, unless your TV is the size of the "Big D" screen at the AMC Theater on Convention Center Boulevard. Personally, I think they are pulling the wool over my eyes, but considering there is no hair up there to slow it down, I'm in a lose-lose situation.
They go against each other, and they yell at each other. But wait, it gets better.
They are yelling at each other while wearing headphones with microphones built in. They can hear each other without the microphones, and yet they scream at each other like they're at Beaver Stadium during a "Whiteout" on a Saturday night.
Let me tell you something, no son of mine has ever been told they need a microphone to be heard. If you could measure decibel levels in one's bloodstream, we'd be the first to pull that one off in a medical journal.
So in other words, our boys still yell at each other during video games, and I have absolutely no say over whether or not that is acceptable. They said you can't play war games and sports games without yelling.
I just need to reminisce about Tom and me during our more quiet times from the 1970s, when the only time you heard yelling was if someone came in the front door with their shoes on when my mom was home.
Next time my sons are wired for sound, I am going to put my Van Halen cassette in my Walkman for a little peace and quiet.