Blow me down hey. I didn’t know that.
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Reminiscing About Early Days of TV
- Thread starter jamesdeluxe
- Start date
Pity. You people really missed out.
jasoncapecod
Well-known member
another childhood favorite was Flipper.
Wow, life in Horseheads!
Growing up in the suburbs of Syracuse, we had the four networks and being hockey nutcases, our father bought an "antenna rotor" (pic below) specifically for watching Hockey Night In Canada every Saturday evening (we were big fans of the play-by-play announcer Danny Gallivan -- @Patrick will definitely know who he was!). We'd adjust the antenna to point straight north and tune into English-language broadcasts from CKWS in Kingston, Ontario. Only 80 miles away as the crow flies but it felt very exotic to us, especially listening to their accent -- e.g. pronouncing "about" as "aboot" and "schedule" as "shejewal" always got laughs. If the skies were clear, it was possible to watch games in French from a station in Montreal.
I clearly remember the day when they installed cable TV in our house sometime in 1978: a brave new world! Here's what the remote looked like (connected by a wire to the TV):
jasoncapecod
Well-known member
I was just gonna mention those remotes from the early cable systems
jimk
Active member
Slightly off-topic TV story: My college years were 1972-76. I had a partial scholarship (track) at the Univ of Maryland and got free room and board, but had to pay for tuition. To show you how cheap college was then and how expensive TVs were: one time my Dad negotiated with me over what he thought was my fair compensation for one year's tuition. He selected a new console TV for our house and I had to pay for it from my summer job income. It looked something like this (random photo from the internet):
I have a feeling most of today's students would gladly pay the price of a new TV for one year of college tuition.
BTW, a couple of TV shows I liked to watch in the '70s with my Dad were Sanford and Son and The Streets of San Francisco. My Dad was in the US Navy so we also watched many repeats of McHale's Navy and Hogan's Heroes. MASH was a little too anti-establishment.
I have a feeling most of today's students would gladly pay the price of a new TV for one year of college tuition.
BTW, a couple of TV shows I liked to watch in the '70s with my Dad were Sanford and Son and The Streets of San Francisco. My Dad was in the US Navy so we also watched many repeats of McHale's Navy and Hogan's Heroes. MASH was a little too anti-establishment.
EMSC
Well-known member
The 4th network of CBS only had a 'nearby' station in Binghamton which, with all the ~1K hills in-between and over ~50 miles away was not going to make it to our house. Syracuse has just a touch of altitude at the bottom of the hills S of there an no big hills at all to the N making your Canadian hockey available.
One interesting aspect that few will understand is the 'quality' of the local news team that works at stations based in tiny Elmira NY (ABC and NBC). Talk about an endless string of turnover of literal 21-22year olds who just got out of college and know nothing about real world, day to day journalism combined with knowing pretty much nothing about the local area either... In ways it was very entertaining, but often in a train wreck type of way. It's still that way today when I go back to see family.
As to Tony's rough history of cable:
I know other parts of town got cable way before we did, but my rural road only got it in ~1986 when I was starting Sr year in HS.
And to really freak you out, where my cousins grew up got cable along their road for the first time in..... 2021!
I suspected that our Verdugo Hills signal shadow got cable very early on, so I asked our 94 year old neighbor who has been there 60 years. She wasn't sure but her educated guess based upon the age of her oldest kid was 1967.
Manhattan was also very early with cable TV (1965), even though the transmitter was on the Empire State Building, because there were so many other close by skyscrapers disrupting the signal. Presumably there were no such issues in Westchester, Long Island and northern New Jersey. When the World Trade Center was under construction during my college years, the signal in NJ was degraded a little and supposedly Westchester's signal had a very bad refection. Upon completion the transmitters were moved to WTC. When Liz moved to NYC in 1985, she said "Everybody had cable," which was definitely not true in L.A. at that time. My parents never had cable when they lived in San Marino (next to Pasadena) 1959-1984.
Manhattan was also very early with cable TV (1965), even though the transmitter was on the Empire State Building, because there were so many other close by skyscrapers disrupting the signal. Presumably there were no such issues in Westchester, Long Island and northern New Jersey. When the World Trade Center was under construction during my college years, the signal in NJ was degraded a little and supposedly Westchester's signal had a very bad refection. Upon completion the transmitters were moved to WTC. When Liz moved to NYC in 1985, she said "Everybody had cable," which was definitely not true in L.A. at that time. My parents never had cable when they lived in San Marino (next to Pasadena) 1959-1984.
My parents were very establishment, but I recall All in the Family and M.A.S.H. being among the few shows I did see regularly during those summers. My limitations on prime time TV were not just during college. There was no TV at all at Webb boarding school grades 10-12 and before then my parents enforced a 9PM bedtime on school nights. I lobbied hard to get our first color TV in 1966.BTW, a couple of TV shows I liked to watch in the '70s with my Dad were Sanford and Son and The Streets of San Francisco. My Dad was in the US Navy so we also watched many repeats of McHale's Navy and Hogan's Heroes. MASH was a little too anti-establishment.
This sounds exactly like the Central Coast situation, where the three major networks would each have a regional station but not in the same place, so not that many people had good reception for all three. I'll bet there were many such places, though it never occurred to me growing up in L.A. Metro.
Any idea how high that Canadian transmitter was in Kingston to be visible 80 miles away? Was it reliably viewable every week? Rarely the Santa Barbara station was viewable from my grandmother's house in Laguna Beach 125 miles away, no doubt assisted by that distance being entirely over the ocean.
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I didn't say that the CKWS transmitter was visible, just that it was 80 miles away and our antenna picked up the signal when we pointed it north. As @EMSC noted, there's nothing to get in the way between our house and Kingston, just the flatlands north of Syracuse and the eastern end of Lake Ontario. If memory serves, it was viewable 80% of the time.
Bad wording on my part. I meant TV visible from transmitter 80 miles away. By simple trig, line of sight from the 1,454 foot Empire State Building antenna would be 66 miles. We all know that favorable atmospheric conditions can extend those distances considerably. Over bodies of water is supposed to help.