Way Back When TV Was New
And television owners were middle-to-upper middle class
Depending on your age and movies you’ve seen of the early tv era, you might think that televisions were in every American family home in the 50’s or 60’s. You are way too young if you think that. Wrong!
Do you know your family’s first television experience? I’ll tell you mine for starters.
First, since we were too poor to buy a television. Our neighbor bought one, and soon everyone went to see terrible wavy lines and static! No matter how the neighbor adjusted the picture or sound, it was bad but that didn’t matter. We were all excited thinking it would get clearer or offer lovely action videos. Haha.
Then in the mid-50’s my father got a pay raise and bought a tiny television like the one shown. There were no such things as consoles or entertainment with static and strange horizontal lines. Plus the “Test” Pattern!
One of the blessings of being poor is that when things like televisions break, you cannot afford to fix them (there were no tv repairmen until years later). So while I was in high school and college (yes, I had a full academic scholarship), having no television to distract from studies made my college education focused on the prize: education, not mass media or reality tv.
How about you and your family?