Sunday, March 15, 2009

What Are Those Things? Alien Space Ships?




No, Sorry to say, these are not space craft that landed on earth from some unknown galaxy. If you are a baby boomer, you know what they are. If you are under 30, these things are called television sets. That's what we had. That was our only choice.
Did we complain about loosing the remote control? No, we didn't because there weren't any. You had to get up off the chair and actually change the station by turning the dial. I think the term couch potato came into our vocabulary when remotes were invented.
Yes, those were the days. Television was next to going to church. It was the o holy one. The whole family gathered around it to watch wholesome family, comedy and musical shows. I really don't think there was anything on back then that would allow for parental discretion.
Did you notice the size of the screens? Did we ever complain? Not really. There wasn't anything else made to compare it to. Actually, at that time, mothers would take their kids to the doctor complaining about eye problems. I know, because I was one of them. The doctor would say, as I was sitting there with my eyes about crossed, "She is sitting too close to the TV set, that's why her eyes don't look right." Probably most of my generation went through that.
We didn't have antennas, we had rabbit ears. If one of the ears broke off, then dad could hook up a metal coat hanger and it would do the trick.
We only had 2, maybe 3 channels. So, in order to watch the Twin Pines Milkys Party Time with Milky the clown, I would have to go to the neighbors house because they somehow could get the Detroit stations. We didn't complain. All the kids in the neighborhood showed up and it was a weekly social event.
As I was writing my last post about television set test patterns, I visualized what the television sets looked like back then. I was compelled to write this to let people of later generations know that, we didn't have much back then compared to now, but what we had was alot!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I remember Televisions, weren't they sort of like computers without a keyboard....

AV

Anonymous said...

The first television set I can remember was one that my family apparently rented, because you had to feed quarters into a slot on the tv to make it work. You'd get an hour, I think, for each quarter and then the screen would go dark. Everybody scrambled to find another quarter so we wouldn't miss the rest of the show.

Anonymous said...

Joyce, thanks for your visit and follow... I have followed you here too.

Av