I remember our first TV set. Musta been 1955 or so. It was a black and white Majestic. Had a little brass flying eagle between the knobs and was contained in a wooden box. Had a 12" screen I believe. It sat on the hand built counter in the living room of our foundation. The upper part of the house wasn't built yet, so we lived in the basement. The roof was flat and coated with tar paper so when it rained we'd put buckets and pans around to catch the water that dripped through the leaks. The house sat on a hill with farms to the north and east, an old strip/shaft mine to the west, a four lane highway south, and across the highway another farm bordered by an old deep shaft coal mine. During the day you could see for miles in any direction as most of the trees on the hill top were gone, at night the western sky would light up from the steel mills in Pittsburgh twenty miles away. All the TV stations would sign off about one o'clock at night and return at five or six in the morning. We'd get up early saturdays and watch the test patterns until RFD #4 came on with the farm report. But that was later when we moved upstairs.
Yeah I remember the early days of black and white tv with two channels ..maybe...if you were lucky....and they signed off about midnight...maybe later on week-ends....but always signed off with the star spangled banner...and then a test pattern for the rest of the night if you were lucky...other wise it was all snow and static. I remember when we got our first color tv...that was in like '66...and that shit was just too cool....hell we even had 3 stations by that time great thing about it is the shows we watched then are still being watched today...
We were lucky enough to have four channels CBS, NBC, ABC, and PBS which started in Pittsburgh. We we watching Mr. Rodgers way before the rest of the U.S. found him! Remember having to turn the TV on about 5 minutes before your favorite show so the tubes could warm up in time!!!
Ours was also a black and white tv set, knob tuning and we only got three channels. But we lived and played outdoors. Different time for sure. Not saying it was better, but so different from today.
Unlike the 1950s and 60s I was Born in 75’ so it wasn’t uncommon for families to have multiple TV sets. We had a small solid state B&W TV set in the kitchen, one large color TV set in the den for the family, My parents had a color TV set in their room, and we had a B&W TV set in the guest bedroom for all the kids. Hotwater
I was born in 1950 and I think I was three when we got our first TV. I was told that there would be children's programs but all that was on was baseball (must have been the world series). I have hated baseball ever since.
the first tv was a bit before my time. i believe the technology (of broadcasting live images) was first demonstrated some time in the 1930s. my parents were only in their late teens. (in the 30s. they were in their late 20s when i was born) i don't remember a time as child, born in 1948 and growing up in the 1950s (that makes me 12 in 1960, to save anyone having to do the math) that my parents didn't have a tv. always a black and white (they never bought a color one until in the 80s when i was long gone), always a 'silvertone' (sears) 'table model'. always with the 'bunny ears'. we never had a rooftop outdoor antenna, until we lived too far from any station to get anything without one. other then a handful of singers and musicians having their own half hours, i remember almost everything on there being pretty much crap until star trek came along. there was ed sullivan and edward r murrow, which each usually had something good on. smothers brothers and laugh in didn't come along until the 60s, and saturday morning cartoons didn't get really good until the 70s. not saying there was ever nothing good, but its always been sturgeons first rule: 9/10ths of everything is crap. well there are things about which there is less and things there is more. but for tv its probably always been closer to 19/20ths. tv was only ever a big deal because we didn't yet have an internet we can all participate in.
I found a picture of the same model "first TV" we had. A Majestic, 142 Monarch of the Air. ? Here's a great site with lots of old TVs like these! ??
only when looking at their tv's. but they did still know how to read from real print on real physical paper, which tended to be mostly black ink on relatively white paper. also the kind of paint they had then tended to fade in a very few years if it was out in the sun.
