As a baby boomer I do not recall not ever NOT having a TV in our home. My parents married in 1949 and one of the first things they bought was a TV. The year before, 1948, only one in ten Americans had even seen a TV. Our TV was in a blond wood cabinet with doors that closed over the maybe 18-20" screen. I'm guessing it was not a cheap investment. A brand new TV, that size, in a piece of furniture no less, probably cost them around $250 in a time when the average person only made $2500-$3000 dollars a year and gas was 17¢ a gallon.
This is my baby brother with a good look at my parents first baby, our TV. By this time our old reliable TV is already a dozen years old. You can't see the "rabbit ears".and the knobs, to turn on, change channels and adjust the volume, you can see are gone. They must have fallen off and been lost early on because I remember a pair of pliers laying permanently on top of the TV to change channels. The black and white picture was often fuzzy especially when the weather was bad. My Mom was particularly adept at making fancy tin foil creations on the "rabbit ears" to get better reception. 2(CBS).5(NBC).7(ABC) and 9(WGN) were the Chicago stations. 7 always came in the clearest. Soon we had channel 11 (PBS) and 32(WTTW). TV went off at midnight with just a test pattern until the morning. As the TV went down they played the "Star Spangled Banner" and if awake my Dad would stand at attention with his hand over his heart.
The shows were pretty tame by todays standards but my parents monitored what we could or could not watch. No "3 stooges", "it's not funny to teach kids to poke each other in the eyes", no "Alfred Hitchcock" or "Twilight Zone", "I'm not staying up all night with kids who see monsters in the dark". At lunchtime they sent us home from school for one hour for lunch and we would have bologna sandwiches and twinkies while watching "Bozo" the clown. My grandmother did not own a TV until I was a teen but she would make a point to be at our house on Saturday night. While she furiously knitted she, Mom and I would watch "Gunsmoke". She herself was afraid to touch the TV. Often when she was watching us she would sit down with her knitting and say in her thick Norwegian accent "Ranae turn on the Gunsmoke". She never got the idea that it only was on Saturday at 9 and I could not bring it up at will. My Mom became a soap opera fan. Her favorite was "The Edge of NIght". Dad watched fights on Friday nights. Initially on Sundays we were not allowed to watch TV on the Lord's Day but I remember in later years my Mom loosened up and "Lassie" and "Family Classics" became Sunday night favorites.
We must have had that TV for at least 15 years. In time the doors loosened from my baby brother banging them open and shut and my Dad decided to just take them off. Periodically a "tube would blow". Dad would remove any suspicious looking tubes and send me to the local hardware store. They had a big machine like thing to test the tubes and then you bought another if the test failed and hopefully now your TV would work. In 1968 or so we got a color TV. Some friends on the block came over for the first showing. It was a big deal. When my husband and I married our first TV was a black and white on a cheesy, wobbly, metal stand. I don't think a day has gone by that a TV hasn't been on somewhere in our home. Even if I am not actively watching, it remains a comforting friend blabbing about something or other in the backround of our lives.
