Television in the 40's

Now before you begin to think life in the 40's revolved around shopping and food, let me assure you that we did, in fact, have a life beyond stores and vendors. There was TELEVISION.

There weren't all that many hours of daily television programming. In the early days, daytime TV was rare. There were a few soap operas, and some of them started as 15 minute shows. Most of the time, if you turned on the TV during the day, you saw the particular station's test pattern being broadcast. Each station had its own distinctive test pattern, and you adjusted the picture until the test pattern was clear. This would ensure clear reception when a program came on. No one wanted to take a chance on missing any of the Texaco Comedy Hour with 'Uncle Miltie' or Howdy Doody. For those few TV illiterates who may be reading this, Uncle Miltie was Milton Berle-one of the first television personalities that was immediately recognizable. Today, of course, his main 'schtick' would be looked at with suspicion. (He was constantly dressing as a woman on the show). Don't knock it. What the hell, it got a laugh and made him famous and rich! Howdy Doody was a wooden puppet, who together with live characters such as Clarabelle the Clown and Princess Summerfallwinterspring, entertained a live audience of children in the "Peanut Gallery".

You also had to remember to turn your television set on several minutes before the show you wanted to watch. Why? Because the television set took a few minutes to warm up to the point where you got reception. Remember, these sets were tube-based, not electronic.

There is one amazing fact in the realm of television. YOU COULD ACTUALLY REPAIR YOUR OWN TELEVISION SET. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I assure you, it was true. When you opened the back of a television set, there was a schematic diagram of the tubes in the set, and the functions each controlled. If, for instance, you had lost the horizontal control on the picture, you checked the schematic to see which tubes were involved in horizontal control. You pulled out the appropriate tubes and took them to a hardware store, where you would find a tube tester. You inserted the tube in the tester, and a meter told you whether or not the tube was good. Once you had identified the bad tube(s), you bought replacements then went home, put the tubes back in the proper sockets, and you had a working television.

Repairmen were called in only when a problem could not be resolved locally. I can remember replacing tubes and changing other parts, such as channel selectors even after I was married. Channel selectors were devices that were attached to the television set that had to be manually turned in order to view another channel. I know it seems hard to believe, but this could not be done from across the room. You had to actually get up and physically turn the selector to the proper channel. Amazing, but true - and we all survived!

I actually got pretty good at replacing channel selectors. The channels were accessed sequentially. If you were on channel 2 and wanted to watch channel 7, the only you could do that was to go through channels 4, 5, then 7. My daughters, who are now grown women with children of their own, used to go from channel 2 to channel 13 in one motion. You could hear the gears on the channel selector grinding from 2 rooms away. Thus, the experience at changing channel selectors.