In the late 1960’s my family owned one television set, and it was a black and white model proudly displayed in the living room. I loved to watch Lassie and Dark Shadows which came on every afternoon after the soap opera The Edge of Night. What I found very frustrating as a 3 or 4 year old girl was Elizabeth Montgomery inviting us all to stay tuned to watch Bewitched… in color. She tricked me every time.
Now my dad has his own stories to tell about TV when he was a young boy growing up in a small town in the 1940's, how when TV first came to Milan and how the townspeople were so excited. Let me let him tell you how it was.
"With the recent completion of the digital television conversion along with the concurrent development of flat screen high definition television receivers, we have entered into a truly exciting era for home entertainment. The merger of technologies of cable systems and satellites can deliver several hundred high definition channels to the home TV set. The development of Digital Video Recorders allows the automatic recording of desired programs for viewing at a more convenient time. As exciting as is all this new technology, it can't compare with the excitement of an eight year old boy who read in the MILAN EXCHANGE newspaper “Something new in Milan... TELEVISION!”
The year was 1948 and Rayburn Appliance on Main Street had the town's first TV set. Unfortunately, the nearest TV station was in St. Louis, Missouri, several hundred miles away. The event was still exciting and townsfolk lined the sidewalk to get a glimpse of the new device with a small, softly glowing screen depicting a snow storm.
My mom and dad visited the 1939 World's Fair in New York where TV was first demonstrated to the public. The ensuing war slowed the implementation of this electronic marvel, but Dad had told us of this marvelous invention and truly, I had waited my entire life to see it! As a child, I would curl up in the easy chair by our large Philco console radio and imagine that, if this were TV, I could look in the dial (screen) and actually see the radio actors reading their lines into the microphones!
The next giant step came when WMCT in Memphis came on the air in December of 1948. We actually had a TV station we could see, occasionally! Of course, we were in the “fringe area” and a tall external antenna was required, but we could actually see a picture. For the first few weeks, it was a “test pattern” at random times as the station was being installed. Dad had stocked his first TV for the Spurgeon R. Jones Co., a 7 inch Motorola, and we left it on constantly, hoping for a glimpse of something. Occasionally someone would shout “It's on!” and we would all run to see the test pattern and marvel at the concept of a picture being sent through the air!
Soon the Memphis station began programming. In these early days, there were no networks and all programs were either local, live productions or film. Evidently, this station bought all the old Hopalong Cassidy western movies because this was the bulk of their early programming. They also added a weekly children's talent program, Steps to Stardom and The Un-Handy Handyman, a local announcer who would demonstrate new gadgets that never worked. The next big step came when the Memphis station was able to run a live remote, and they began to broadcast live wrestling on Monday night from Ellis Auditorium. Word of this spread rapidly, and folks began to congregate on Monday afternoon, asking if they could stay and watch. Dad soon borrowed (or bought) old folding chairs from the funeral home, set them up in front of the TV, and stayed open on Monday nights. The crowds grew as “rasslin'” gained popularity. Folks quickly adopted favorites, such as Farmer Jones who carried a pet pig to the ring and wrestled barefoot wearing bib overalls. A favorite trick of his was to retrieve his “brogan” shoe from his corner and beat his opponent over the head while the referee always seemed to be looking the other direction. In hindsight this was obviously fake, but it seemed real to a small-town eight-year-old boy.
For the next ten years or so, television was a big part of my dad's business and a big part of my life, as I worked after school helping to deliver TV sets, installing antennas, and riding with the TV technicians in case large console TV's needed returning to the shop for repairs. TV reception improved as TV stations increased in number and power. The coaxial cable reached Memphis, permitting live network programming. In the early 1950's I even saw a demonstration of color TV at the Mid-South Fair in Memphis, much as my parents had seen the first television demonstrated at the World's Fair. Even with all the improvements to TV over the past sixty years, and there have been many, nothing can match the thrill of first seeing a picture magically received out of the air!”
