Calling Any "Old Timers" (and I mean that in a nice way...)

[LKellerIII]

"My dad was learning to be a tv repair man and therefore we had 2 tvs, both of them being in our living room."

How did your dad do financially, Michael? The local TV repairman was a very important person in most communities. Electronic devices in those days were comparatively expensive to buy, so most people repaired them, rather than just throwing them away like we do these days.

In the late 50s and 60s, TVs cost the modern equivalent of many thousands of dollars. so when your TV went on the fritz - you didn't replace it , you repaired it. I remember that my parents' original TV - a 23 inch RCA black-and-white console - had at least 2 picture tubes over the 12 years or so that they owned it. In the LA suburb where I grew up (population 25,000), there were at least 3 or 4 TV repairmen who stayed very busy.

The TVs were powered by vacuum tubes, which would burn out frequently. If you were mechanically proficient, you unscrewed the back of your TV, removed the tubes, and took them down to your local electronic store for testing - then you'd replace them yourself. But if you were technologically clueless - like my parents; you didn't replace them yourself , you called the TV repairman, and he made a house call.

The last hurrah for TV repairman was the early VCR era in the early 1980s. In those days, VCRs cost about $800 (maybe the equivalent to $1600 these days), so a trip to the VCR repairman was essential every few months for a cleaning and service...about $45 as I remember. Once VCRs dropped under $100, there was no point repairing them, you just threw them away.

My current DVD player cost under $40, and it works great...I haven't made the switch to Blue Ray yet.

 

[nmoore6676]

I remember the TV repairman who came to our house (the sets were too big and fragile to haul in) and he had a big case of tubes he carried, more in the bins on his truck. I was a young kid then but interested in electronics so I built a lot of radio kits and ham stuff. Our TV repairman who was as friend of my Dad would always explain to me what he was doing and how he tested the tubes. The manufacturers published service manuals for all the major brands (and the private labels they made for stores) that guided you through the symptoms and which tubes to suspect. Most sets used pretty much the same components anyway so if you saw a certain group of tubes you could just use the manual that came closest to guide you.

Later they had do it yourself tune testers in places like drug stores where you could bring in your tubes to test them. They would sell you replacements, I always wondered if the machine might not have been rigged. Later on I built my own with a Knight Kit, I think from Allied Radio, and did my own testing. Picked up some spending money fixing sets for the neighbors, instead of mowing lawns and washing cars like my buddies.

Initially when they began using circuit board modules you would use a similar kind of diagnostic flowchart tree to figure out what to swap. Once they used more and more integrated circuits on a single board, and prices dropped as well, it became cheaper and more practical to just junk them and buy a new one. There are not now enough discrete components in home electronics to make repairing them feasible. Even computers are going that way as more peripheral interfaces are built onto the motherboard. My last bastion of tinkering and fixing is going away but then I'm getting too old to care anymore.

 

[RicoGregg]

More things I remember:

TV stations signing on at 8am.
The "silhouette" dancing couple on KHJ/9's promos and image logos.
Ben Hunter as KTTV/11's "Jack of all trades."
The national anthem being run at both sign-on and sign-off, on grainy film the stations obviously got for free from the armed forces.
Channel 5 running a cartoon show at 11pm. A kid's cartoon show ("ask your parents if you can stay up a little later").
Also on Channel 5, "Your Weather and Mine", with comedian Cliff Norton. Don't ask me to explain, but trust me, it was VERY strange.
What I later came to call "The Channel 13 Movie Trilogy", three movies that seemed like they were always on KCOP: The Fuzzy Pink Nightgown w/Jane Russell; Hollywood Canteen with various Warner Bros. stars; and Four Jills in a Jeep, with Carole Landis, Martha Raye, Kay Francis and Mitzi Mayfair, and it featured Phil Silvers.
Give Us This Day, a religious mini-sermon (about 60 seconds) that ran on Channel 2 (KNXT in those given days) just after the national anthem at sign on and just before the anthem at sign off. It was done on very scratchy B&W film.
Panorama Latino, which ran on Channel 13 weekend mornings before KMEX was created.
The Civil Defense triangles at EBS test time. BTW, air raid sirens were everywhere in those days. I know of one remaining today.

 

[nmoore6676]

The Civil Defense triangles at EBS test time. BTW, air raid sirens were everywhere in those days. I know of one remaining today.

There is still one, with all the wires disconnected, down the block from me (Vanowen and Coldwater in North Hollywood). In Ohio where I am from they converted many into tornado warning sirens. When I was very young only the Crosley (WLW) stations came one early, like 6am. They did local news and weather and farm reports before "Today" from NBC started. Almost all signed off at midnight or 1am, I can remember my Dad and Mom falling asleep (we were one of the 1st two TV families) in their bedroom and the National Anthem, then static. I would get up and turn it off. Dayton had a UHF station in the late 50's (maybe the 60's) I think that came on at noon. Sometimes they just ran a loop of some Airforce planes alternating with "The Star Spangled Banner" until they started actual programming at 2:30 or 3pm.

I also remember some kind of a prayer thought for the day type thing that ran but I don't recall what channel. May have been the same one you saw in LA as I think it may have been filmed too. Some of the syndicated on kinescope shows from KTLA were on the non Crosley stations in Ohio but I was so young I only vaguely recall most of them. Jack LaLanne also came to us on the old kinescope film.

Cincinnati channel 5 which was the flagship for their mini-network produced shows like the Midwestern Hayride which was sometimes picked up as an NBC summer replacement. Other Cincinnati shows picked up were from WCPO, channel 9 like "Uncle AL" which was on ABC for a while and "Dotty Mack's Pantomime Hit Parade" on the old Dumont network. I think that show may have come out of a disagreement with the Musicians Union wherein they couldn't get live bands and singers. They had Dotty and the others on the show act out the hit songs of the day while the record played. The Pantomime show continues after Dotty left with other people like Bob Braun who I think was on KTTV much later after he left Cincinnati following some years co-hosting with Ruth Lyons and later on his own a daily noontime woman's variety interview type show.

 

[BlueHen]

In the mid-1960's, there were local shows in many markets which were copies of the network shows: Shindig and Hullabaloo. Here in Cincinnati in was "Five A-Go-Go" on Channel 5 (of course). Cleveland had a smiliar show called "Upbeat" which was shown here on Channel 9 which was a Scripps Howard station like the one in Cleveland where the show originated from. These shows featured girls in mini-skirts and white boots (either ankle-high or knee-high) dancing to music and sometimes with a recording artist as a guest.

Something similar in Philadelphia - there was a Saturday afternoon dance show broadcast live from Steel Pier in Atlantic City hosted by Ed Hurst. It was probably on in the summer only.

TV stations signing on at 8am.

...and network prime-time starting at 7:30. Remember when the 7:30-8:00 slot was turned over to local stations (around 1970 or 71)? I don't think the powers that be intended it to become the entertainment news or game-show haven it did.

Give Us This Day, a religious mini-sermon (about 60 seconds) that ran ... just after the national anthem at sign on and just before the anthem at sign off.

I remember that. And wasn't there another one called Thought For Today? (It could have been local only).


I can remember having 3 channels on VHF - ABC, CBS, NBC - and that was it. Then PBS came along, followed by 2 or 3 independent channels on UHF. To change channels, you actually had to get up, walk over to the set, and turn the knob. I think the better sets had click tuning for the UHF channels, but that may have come later. I remember it was hit or miss trying to get UHF... there were special attachments for the old rabbit ear antennas.

And if you missed your favorite show, you just hoped to catch the rerun. Series ran well over 30 episodes for a season, so there was no guarantee every episode would be shown again... and again and again.

 

[mbayus]

To answer your question Lkeller My dad didn't do well at al. You remember, I said it was a small mining town and most of our family lived there. My dad repared my mom's aunt's tv and just charged her for the parts, and she had a cow, so my dad figured that he could not do well at all. In 1955, we moved to Flint Michigan where my dad got a very good job with General Mottors.

He did fix our tv sets, however, untille they became too new. He also fixed sets for his friends at work..

 

[RicoGregg]

The Civil Defense triangles at EBS test time. BTW, air raid sirens were everywhere in those days. I know of one remaining today.

There is still one, with all the wires disconnected, down the block from me (Vanowen and Coldwater in North Hollywood). In Ohio where I am from they converted many into tornado warning sirens.

That makes two that I know about. The one I referred to is located on Glendale Blvd. in Silverlake right in front of a parochial school. I don't know about the wires' status.

When I was very young only the Crosley (WLW) stations came one early, like 6am. They did local news and weather and farm reports before "Today" from NBC started.

You reminded me of another fond childhood memory: the farm reports. Often, stations would run filmed farm reports usually supplied by the Dept. of Agriculture. I loved those things! They were so campy.

 

[YEKIMI]

I grew up in Florida and I remember the old Civil Defense siren that was located on a corner section of the school grounds. Sadly, it's gone now. I remember doing the old duck and cover drills three times a week during the Cuban Missle crisis. Some student pointed out that since we had big glass windows from ceiling to just about waist level if the bomb did hit it would blow out the windows and send all the glass flying inward and we would be sliced to death. After that, they made us all go duck against the concrete block wall below the windows figuring that if they did blow inwards it would all fly over our heads and miss us. I also remember it being cold enough to snow one day [this was in the Saint Petersburg area] during the missle mess and the teacher refusing to let us go play in it because she was sure it was some radioactive ash of something being spread by the communists somehow. She only let us go out after she saw other kids playing outside for 15 minutes and nothing was happening to them. I live in Ohio now and some of the older buildings in the small town where I used to live still have the Civil Defense air raid shelter signs on them...faded with age but still legible. I still get nervous and ill at ease whenever the tornado sirens go on because the first thing that springs to mind is "nuclear attack" even 45+ years later.

 

[nmoore6676]

The Civil Defense triangles at EBS test time. BTW, air raid sirens were everywhere in those days. I know of one remaining today.

There is still one, with all the wires disconnected, down the block from me (Vanowen and Coldwater in North Hollywood). In Ohio where I am from they converted many into tornado warning sirens.

That makes two that I know about. The one I referred to is located on Glendale Blvd. in Silverlake right in front of a parochial school. I don't know about the wires' status.

When I was very young only the Crosley (WLW) stations came one early, like 6am. They did local news and weather and farm reports before "Today" from NBC started.

You reminded me of another fond childhood memory: the farm reports. Often, stations would run filmed farm reports usually supplied by the Dept. of Agriculture. I loved those things! They were so campy.

The Crosley (WLW) stations had a farm director and they had an actual working farm located at the Mason, Ohio transmitter site of WLW radio. I recollect that they used a microphone that was inside of a thing that looked like an ear of corn. If you want campy, that sure was! The Cincinnati WLW-T station was also one of the first if not the first to have a real meteorologist, Tony Sands, on staff to do weather reports. Do you remember the first TV weather radar? They stood in front of a big round radar screen, black and white with all of the blips and all. There was a big board with the cities and towns and those slide in numbers for the high and low temperatures.

I see a lot of those old alert sirens here in The Valley but I can't say where they all are exactly. Most of the ones here look different than those in Ohio, like older, were some of them left from WWII? All of them here are rusted and the electrical wires have been cut off. I seem to vaguely remember when some of them still worked,they went off at noon on Fridays (maybe only once a month?). I might also be remembering Ohio where most cities have turned them into Tornado sirens. Besides the triangle for "Conelrad" on TV the old AM radios had 640 and 1240 marked with them in little circles.

 

[Stanislav]

I also remember it being cold enough to snow one day [this was in the Saint Petersburg area] during the missle mess and the teacher refusing to let us go play in it because she was sure it was some radioactive ash of something being spread by the communists somehow. She only let us go out after she saw other kids playing outside for 15 minutes and nothing was happening to them.

Wow....that is the best little anecdote I have ever seen for summing up the paranoia of that era. I was just 4 during that crisis, and we were living in suburban NJ, just 15 or 20 minutes from NYC. I do remember my family packing the station wagon, being ready to flee to my grandparents' summer home in Vermont if things got dicey. Little did they know at the time that there were actually some old missile sites right by Lake Champlain (on both the VT and NY sides) not too far from that house that probably would have been targeted, so in reality we would not have been out of harm's way. Yikes!!

 

[nmoore6676]

I also remember it being cold enough to snow one day [this was in the Saint Petersburg area] during the missle mess and the teacher refusing to let us go play in it because she was sure it was some radioactive ash of something being spread by the communists somehow. She only let us go out after she saw other kids playing outside for 15 minutes and nothing was happening to them.

Wow....that is the best little anecdote I have ever seen for summing up the paranoia of that era. I was just 4 during that crisis, and we were living in suburban NJ, just 15 or 20 minutes from NYC. I do remember my family packing the station wagon, being ready to flee to my grandparents' summer home in Vermont if things got dicey. Little did they know at the time that there were actually some old missile sites right by Lake Champlain (on both the VT and NY sides) not too far from that house that probably would have been targeted, so in reality we would not have been out of harm's way. Yikes!!

Since we are on this topic and old TV. during the 50's weren't there some PSA's running that showed kids in a school room diving under their desks to demonstrate "duck and cover"? Remember contractors' commercials selling fall out shelters? When I was a kid they had one set up at the Clark County Fair (above ground) so you could "tour" through it. There was that old spy drama series "I Led Three Lives" which we watched every week.

There was the biggest live television extravaganza ever, even before CNN and all, The McCarthy hearings on every channel as I recall. I was too young to actually remember much detail about it. I have in my mind the scene of a bunch of old men seated at big long tables with a phalanx of those old microphones in front of each of them all facing a smaller table with some poor soul being grilled by them. All pretty scary for us little kids, no wonder so many people are so screwed up today. :

 

[Corky Marlowe]

Since we are on this topic and old TV. during the 50's weren't there some PSA's running that showed kids in a school room diving under their desks to demonstrate "duck and cover"? Remember contractors' commercials selling fall out shelters? When I was a kid they had one set up at the Clark County Fair (above ground) so you could "tour" through it. There was that old spy drama series "I Led Three Lives" which we watched every week.

There was the biggest live television extravaganza ever, even before CNN and all, The McCarthy hearings on every channel as I recall. I was too young to actually remember much detail about it. I have in my mind the scene of a bunch of old men seated at big long tables with a phalanx of those old microphones in front of each of them all facing a smaller table with some poor soul being grilled by them. All pretty scary for us little kids, no wonder so many people are so screwed up today.
One of the old TeeVeeToons albums has the "Duck And Cover" song...

The big moment from the McCarthy hearings was the Army's lead attorney, Joseph Welch, asking McCarthy, "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" As for the description of the "old men at big long tables", "The Godfather Part 2" was just on a couple nights ago, and that makes me think of the scenes where Michael Corleone and Frankie Pentangeli are testifying before the Senate.

 

[anotherguyTN]

Here's a copy of the Duck and Cover film: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0K_LZDXp0I

 

[RicoGregg]

There was the biggest live television extravaganza ever, even before CNN and all, The McCarthy hearings on every channel as I recall. I was too young to actually remember much detail about it. I have in my mind the scene of a bunch of old men seated at big long tables with a phalanx of those old microphones in front of each of them all facing a smaller table with some poor soul being grilled by them. All pretty scary for us little kids, no wonder so many people are so screwed up today.
The big moment from the McCarthy hearings was the Army's lead attorney, Joseph Welch, asking McCarthy, "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"

Please forgive me for wandering off-topic, but the junior senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, had no sense of decency whatsoever. He was a delusional alcoholic who needlessly hurt people, ruined lives, and destroyed careers because he thought his "Anti-Communist Crusade" would one day make him President. Then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a great man in my book, and a Republican like McCarthy, avoided him like the plague.

McCarthy's toadie, Roy Cohn, was also pretty void of human decency. He may have been worse than McCarthy. Later on, he was known as the lawyer who represented the sleazebags who ran New York's notorious Studio 54 nightclub. Cohn died disbarred and discredited.

A great line from the Simpsons: A teacher is reading a story to her class and it ends with her saying:"...and the little boy that nobody liked grew up to be Roy Cohn. Are there any questions?"

 

[nmoore6676]

There was the biggest live television extravaganza ever, even before CNN and all, The McCarthy hearings on every channel as I recall. I was too young to actually remember much detail about it. I have in my mind the scene of a bunch of old men seated at big long tables with a phalanx of those old microphones in front of each of them all facing a smaller table with some poor soul being grilled by them. All pretty scary for us little kids, no wonder so many people are so screwed up today.
The big moment from the McCarthy hearings was the Army's lead attorney, Joseph Welch, asking McCarthy, "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"

Please forgive me for wandering off-topic, but the junior senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, had no sense of decency whatsoever. He was a delusional alcoholic who needlessly hurt people, ruined lives, and destroyed careers because he thought his "Anti-Communist Crusade" would one day make him President. Then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a great man in my book, and a Republican like McCarthy, avoided him like the plague.

McCarthy's toadie, Roy Cohn, was also pretty void of human decency. He may have been worse than McCarthy. Later on, he was known as the lawyer who represented the sleazebags who ran New York's notorious Studio 54 nightclub. Cohn died disbarred and discredited.

A great line from the Simpsons: A teacher is reading a story to her class and it ends with her saying:"...and the little boy that nobody liked grew up to be Roy Cohn. Are there any questions?"

I agree with your assessment but the point made here, I think, was the historical nature of those hearings and the Kefauver hearings which preceded them into how broadcasting and television in particular have opened up the workings of government to all of us. In today's cable TV universe where you have C-Span and many state legislatures and city councils available on TV it is not as big of a deal as back in the 50's. I remember TV coverage of the political conventions in the 50's and even as a kid I sat fascinated by it all. It was better than Roy Rogers and almost better than Superman to me.

Today as an older adult I find the whole thing less attractive, maybe because I've become a cynic, or perhaps because there is so much of it to see. Also I think the MTV editing techniques and 20 second sound bites have made it all less of an educational experience and more of a multimedia spectacle.

 

[RicoGregg]

I agree with your assessment but the point made here, I think, was the historical nature of those hearings and the Kefauver hearings which preceded them into how broadcasting and television in particular have opened up the workings of government to all of us. In today's cable TV universe where you have C-Span and many state legislatures and city councils available on TV it is not as big of a deal as back in the 50's. I remember TV coverage of the political conventions in the 50's and even as a kid I sat fascinated by it all. It was better than Roy Rogers and almost better than Superman to me.

Today as an older adult I find the whole thing less attractive, maybe because I've become a cynic, or perhaps because there is so much of it to see. Also I think the MTV editing techniques and 20 second sound bites have made it all less of an educational experience and more of a multimedia spectacle.

And that's why my very first words in that post were "Please forgive me for wandering off-topic."

That was an appalling time in American history, and television's role in it can never be understated.

It's up to both our educational system and the present day media to never let people forget that era, lest we make questionable choices in elections. :

In all seriousness, younger media executives seem to be blase' about anything that happened before 1981.

You know what they say about people who forget the past.