Televisions and Baby Boomers

BY TERRY SHAW

Willmar — As hard as it is to believe, most of the Baby Boomers growing up in the mid-50s didn’t have a television in their younger years.

Oh, TVs were around, but who could afford one? And the reception, unless you lived in a big city, was very weak. When my family got a TV in 1953, I was in the third grade and 8 years old.

Televisions were so unique in the early days that there were no “television stores.” In our little town, for example, the implement dealer not only sold implements, but he sold sewing machines, and RCA televisions and radios.

TV was still considered a novelty, just like 3-D movies were in the movie theaters.

But once, in June of 1935, according to our local newspaper ad, there was a service shop in Litchfield called Glader-Wilson Radio and TV. I can’t imagine that they repaired any televisions, as there weren’t any in town and the Minneapolis stations, 100 miles away, were hardly up and running yet. That ad was pretty forward-thinking.

In August of 1948, there was an article in that same local newspaper telling the public that our town’s “electric” business had a new Motorola television set in the store.

The article said that the television set, (not called a “TV” yet), “projects a clear image of the radio program” and predicted that someday it would be as common as radios in everybody’s homes.

Funny though, at that time there was only one TV station in Minneapolis/St. Paul (KSTP, which had started in April of 1948).

Then, in September of 1949, a local home supply business had a press release in the paper telling the public that the business owner had a new TV in his home and people were invited, by appointment only, to come and view “this new entertainment.”

When we got our first television “set”, our single-parent mother told us four boys about the new TV the night before we got it. (Why did they call it a “set”?) I couldn’t wait to get home from school the next day. I got off the school bus, ran into our house, and saw the television standing along the north wall of our living room.

It felt like Christmas morning. The TV had a deep reddish-brown mahogany cabinet about 36 inches high and 18 inches wide with two brass lions’ heads holding rings in their mouths on fake doors in the bottom half.

The entire bottom half served absolutely no purpose, as the tiny speaker was right on the very top of the cabinet.

The top half of the cabinet contained a small twelve-inch black and white screen, with gold letters below, spelling Emerson on a pull-down door that concealed four controls right under the screen. On and volume, brightness, horizontal “hold,” and vertical “hold.”

Our mother had bought the television from an electrician in town who sold Emersons out of his home. On top of the television was a note, which read, “Don’t touch until I’m home, Mom.” Rats! She didn’t get home from work until 5 p.m.

When she finally got home, we started pestering her to let us turn it on. “We’re not turning that TV on until we’ve eaten supper and all of the dishes are washed and put away,” Mom said.

We rushed through the meal and we were extra helpful that night clearing the kitchen table and washing the dishes. Mom had also started insisting that we pray the Rosary every night while we did the dishes. “The family that prays together, stays together.”

Finally, a little before 7 p.m., we all gathered in the living room, jockeying for the best place on the sofa, which Mom had pulled to the center of the room facing the TV.

The single easy chair off to the side had been declared hers.

She turned off all the lights, except for a special “TV lamp” sitting on top of the television. The 40W light bulb was in a red upside-down cone, which was perched on the middle of a little red settee, on which sat two miniature plaster Chinese people, a boy and a girl, dressed in red with gold trim.

Mom had been told to have a TV lamp so that her children’s eyes wouldn’t get ruined watching television.

The big moment had arrived. Mom reached down and turned the volume knob to the right with a click. The small screen started to flicker. A small white dot in the center of the screen slowly grew as the picture tube warmed up. This was taking an eternity.

Suddenly the dot jumped to fill the screen. We had a screen full of…nothing. Nothing, but snow, accompanied by a roaring hiss from the tiny speaker.

Mom turned the volume down and then, clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk…she turned the channel tuner dial, which had numbers from one to twelve on it, until she came to a stop at a channel that wasn’t all snow.

Somewhere in the snowy screen was the faint image of…NBC’s The Goodyear Television Playhouse. An hour-long drama without any cowboys and Indians or police shooting at bad guys. We had waited for this? Over the next few days, we did everything we could to improve the reception, including moving the TV set closer to the house’s front window, but all we could get was a snowy WCCO channel 4, a clearer KSTP channel 5, a snowy KMSP channel 9, and a very snowy WTCN channel 11.

Mom called the electrician and he came over and went up on the roof.

He yelled down, “Is it clearer yet?” over and over, as he slowly turned the antenna, until Mom finally told him to hold it and said to us, “Well, that’s the best we’re gonna get, I suppose.”

It didn’t get much better until a few years later when the broadcasting stations started building bigger transmitter towers.

Our little town was just too far away from the transmitting towers in Minneapolis and St. Paul.

Television shows didn’t come on until 6 in the morning in the Midwest. Before that, all you got was a test pattern.

I never knew what in the world you were supposed to do with that darn test pattern. Maybe to adjust those knobs in the compartment? We’d be watching a TV show and suddenly the picture would start twisting sideways. One of us would have to jump up, run to the set, and delicately turn the appropriate knob until the picture straightened out.

“There…there…there…that’s it…no, back the other way, you dummy…no… here let me do it.”

“Now the picture’s rolling…put it back the way it was.”

Then, at midnight, everything went off the air after the National Anthem was played with a movie of jets flying superimposed over the front of the American flag.

I sat on the floor right up by the screen, because I couldn’t see the television very well. I wouldn’t be getting my glasses for two more years. Mom kept telling me to back up from the screen because I was going to ruin my eyes, but I would just inch forward back to where I had been.

So, I became the official knob turner, that is, the remote control. I became quite good at keeping a nice straight picture for my family. Plus, I got to “surf” the channels after shows ended. “There…leave that on.” “No, we ain’t watchin’ that junk.” “Mom…make him put it back to where it was.”

In those early days of TV, fixing one usually involved finding a broken or burned-out tube. A lot of people repaired TVs by themselves.

I remember our drug store having a contraption you could plug a tube in to and it would tell you if the tube was bad. If it was, you could buy a replacement… in the drug store.

Pretty soon, there were electronics stores, furniture stores, music stores, hardware stores, you name it stores, all over our little town selling TVs.

And there were many more repair shops with actual “technicians.” You needed these “technicians” because, before long, you couldn’t repair TVs yourself anymore.

Something new had replaced the tubes. Something called “transistors” and “circuit boards.”