240713 Fifties Television

I was watching a movie yesterday that was set in the 1950s era. There was one scene where it showed a TV set. That brought back a memory. We had a black and white tv that had a dial that was twisted to select a channel. There were 13 different dial settings, but at that time there were only 3 stations in the city broadcasting. One was NBC, two was CBS and three was ABC. That was it. There was one show we always watched every week. The title of the show was "My 3 Sons" with Fred MacMurray and William Frawley along with 3 boys Don Grady, Stanly Livingston and Tim Considine (who was also one of the Mousekiteers on the Mickey Mouse Club show). TV began broadcasting at six in the morning and broadcasting quit at 10:30 at night after a rendidion of "The Star Spangled Banner". At any other than those hours there was nothing but a test pattern shown.

There were no movie channels or anything like we have today. There were no channels you could subscribe to.

Late in the fifties there was a UHF channel available with regular movies and science fiction movies playing. There was a problem though, one had to have a UHF antenna and a small UHF converter box to play the movies, which my dad bought. We had to use the 13th dial on the regular TV to see the new channel. One more thing, there was no hand held remote control. You had to get up, walk over to the TV and then manually change the channel, unless you were a father so you could tell your son to get up and change the channel for you. Oh the tribulations we suffered through in the fifties!

Now we have TV shows 24 hours a day. There are movie channels, documentary channels, news, weather, sports, political channels, channels for gun enthusiasts, history channels and comedy channels. Some are free channels, others are paid subscriptions. We are blessed to have so much entertainment available these days.