'57 Channels and Nothing On'
Time was, watching TV required patience, neighbors, and a touch of engineering savvy.
By Donnie Johnston
COLUMNIST
The first TV show I ever watched was Gunsmoke.
It was a Saturday night back in either 1955 or 1956 and we were visiting a neighbor’s house down the road and the TV was on. Cowboys, horses and guns blazing. I was hooked on the spot.
The first movie I ever saw on TV was High Noon. It may have been the same year. My mother was babysitting for a friend, and she took me along. Again, cowboys, horses and shooting. Great entertainment.
Both families had portable TV sets, 17-inch models that sat on a table. Console models were much more expensive and only the rich could afford them. And, of course, the TV world existed only in black and white.
One of my great uncles also had a TV and occasionally we would go up there for a visit and watch professional wrestling, his family’s favorite entertainment. “Rassling” came on every Tuesday and Thursday nights on Channel 5 (WTTG) and it was a big hit among the country folks.
My uncle’s TV was an older model, dating back to the late 1940s. The unit was about three feet wide, 20 inches top-to-bottom and 24 inches deep. The picture itself was only about eight inches high and 10 inches wide.
Nobody had a good antenna in those days, only cheap ones designed for suburban reception. We were 60 miles from the nearest TV tower, so the picture was more “snow” (white electrical interference) than anything else. Still, at least in most cases, you could figure out what was going on.
Being 60 miles from Washington, most TV sets could only get two stations – Channels 4 and 5. I suppose that was because their towers were on the Virginia side of DC or maybe because their signals were more powerful.
If you had a big fancy antenna, you could also get Channels 7 and 9 (WMAL and WTOP. The channels stopped there. There were no UHF stations until Channel 20 came along in the late 1970s.
A family who moved into the neighborhood about 1958 had a color console TV and one night I was invited over to the show Northwest Passage. NBC was the only network with color back then and there were only a very few color presentations, all in prime time, of course. The shows always began with the peacock unfolding his tailfeathers and the pronouncement, “The following program in brought to you in living color on NBC.”
We got our first TV set in about 1960, an older console model that someone had taken to a repair shop and abandoned. It cost $20.
We could not afford an antenna, but I salvaged parts of an old one from the town dump and mounted it in a sapling I had cut down in the nearby woods. The wood acted as an insulator, so we didn’t get much of a picture, which would often go in and out as the wind blew. Then I would go turn the pole while my brother watched the picture and yelled when it was acceptable.
I later improved on this method by hanging an improvised coat hanger on the electric lines that were attached to the side of the house. I would step out my bedroom window onto the metal porch roof and manipulate the wire coat hanger along the electric line until my brother gave the okay signal.
I sit here now and write this column only because that electric wire had a cloth covering. Still, how I did not get electrocuted remains a mystery. But when you’re poor, you take chances.
These days I turn on my TV set and get hundreds of channels via satellite. They are all not only in color, but in high definition on a 55-inch screen.
Even more unbelievable is the fact that I can stream color sports events and other shows on my smartphone almost anywhere I may be located – and at the time of my choosing.
When I was a child, there might be one baseball game a week televised. Now I can watch every game every team plays all season long.
Back then TV signals were free for the taking. Now I pay $200 a month to get hundreds of channels that I never watch.
Some things, however, haven’t changed. In 1960 my favorite shows were Gunsmoke, Perry Mason, Andy Griffith and I Love Lucy.
Guess what. Besides baseball, those are still the shows I now watch almost every night.
They don’t make ‘em line they used to.
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