I’m not sure when exactly my parents gave up on that idea. Eventually we just ate in the kitchen and put a TV in there. It was a blessing, my parents would get distracted by the news and stop fighting with each other or yelling at us. Now we eat in the living room most of the time while watching Wonder Boy (my gigantic TV). It’s much easier that way because the dining room table is covered with computers, tools, and excess cooking appliances.
In my fundamentalist family, the world was full of evils. Dancing, sex, card playing, drinking, smoking, Coca-Cola (!) – all were the work of the devil. Around the 1950’s, TV was added to the list. We could have hardly have afforded a B&W set anyway, so buying one was out of the question, and color wasn’t available yet.
But my neighbors were getting TVs in the 50’s, and I often stopped by friends’ houses to watch after-school programs: Mickey Mouse Club, Howdy Doody, American Bandstand (which combined three evils: dancing, rock and roll, and TV). I could never reveal what I did after school to my parents other than saying I was at a friend’s house. Let’s just say we “studied” a lot.
I was able to convince my mother that there was one worthwhile program on TV on Sunday nights; Disneyland, and she let me go to our neighbors to watch it. I told her it was a 2-hour program (it was only one) and that allowed me time to watch another like Steve Allen or Ed Sullivan that followed before she telephoned.
With such a limited exposure, I was fascinated by everything on TV but I had to wait until I was old enough to tell my parents to shove it before I was able to exercise my fascination, and then it became boring.
Would you believe I briefly was employed in high school as a TV repairman’s assistant?
I miss the station sign off and test patterns. They were still doing those in the 70’s.
Me too.
I remember squabbling with my brother and sister over who was going to get to draw on the screen during Winky Dink. We also watched Mickey Mouse Club, but still mostly played outside. I do recall a time or two waking up in the living room to see the test pattern after the whole family had fallen asleep watching Sid Caesar or Milton Berle.
My earliest memory of tv is Romper Room. Watched it around 67-70 when I was 3 to 6 yrs old. I think it was in black & white. I now my tv then was b&w.
remember the romper room prayer?
God is great, God is good. Let us thank him for our food. Amen.
We got a TV pretty early, since my father sold them. I did watch the Mickey Mouse Club and especially Davy Crockett. I also recall our local station stripping old shows (in 1958) like The Buccaneers and Rescue 8. There was also Sky King and Roy Rogers.
One problem was that did not get NBC – just ABC and CBS. ABC was far behind the other networks at the time. We got a UHF converter around 1961 (was able to watch The Americans) and I was the only one in my class to be able to watch The Man From U.N.C.L.E.. We got cable around this time; we had it during the 1965 NYC blackout (We were the only place on the east coast that was unaffected; we only lost power for about two minutes, though we could see the NYC stations knocked off the air and then running on low power).
I was born in 1955, and we ALWAYS had a TV since my dad was at that time a TV repairman (he had been in the US Army Signal Corps in WWII).
My baby book says I loved watching “Lassie” and “Mickey Mouse Club” before I could even talk. Prior to starting kindergarden, I remember watching “Romper Room,” “Beat the Clock,” “Queen for a Day,” “The Adventures of Superman,” “Sea Hunt,” “Whirlybirds,” “Highway Patrol,” “Cannonball,” “Hopalong Cassidy,” “Roy Rogers,” “Gunsmoke,” “Have Gun, Will Travel,” “Maverick,” “My Little Margie,” “Love That Bob,” “I Love Lucy,” “Ozzie and Harriet,” “Checkmate,” “77 Sunset Strip,” “Walt Disney,” and many, many more. The first movie I can remember watching on TV was the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup, which was so bizarre it creeped me out.
Shows back then were definitely better than most of the crap that’s on today. Maybe not as polished in some ways, but more focused on story and character than special effects, and with real orchestral music.
My older brother was born in '47 and used to tell me stories about Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, and other shows I was born too late to watch or appreciate. To me, they seem like another Golden Age.
My step-father was a part-time TV repair and what-not guy. Not enough business in the small town for it to be full time. Very remote area. Big antenna on the hill and cable run down into town to wire people up. Cable TV! 2 channels. (That is not a typo.) And one of them was quite snowy. So really watched one channel most of the time. NBC. The Friday Night Fights was the big show of the week for some strange reason.
Lots of westerns and some mysteries.
There was a lot of “filler” in the early days. Which is why there was a “revival” of things like the 3 Stooges and Our Gang shorts. Very cheap to air. Weekday afternoons, after the game shows and such, had old movies.
Sunday afternoons in the winter were the deadest. Sometimes they would air old industrial film docs that they got to air for free. Plus the earliest ancestors of infomercials.
Cheap local programming: Kiddie shows, local amateur hours, etc.
In primetime, it was amazing how one or two shows would just dominate things. That was all anybody would talk about, until the next one would hit.
Watching Elvis singing “You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog.” for the first time cannot be topped (except for The Beatles on Ed Sullivan).
I’ve watched some of the old shows from the 50s and 60s lately (Netflix and retro channels). The production quality is just awful. Especially for many of the ads. Ozzie and Harriet is terrible. Harriet can’t act!
But Mr. Peepers is still good.
Wow-- talk about a trip down memory lane!
It’s interesting that in addition to the nuclear family shows (Ozzie & Harriet, Father Knows Best), there were a fair number of single-parent families, like My Little Margie, Family Affair, Andy Griffith, Bachelor Father… I guess I should amend that to say “single FATHER families.”
Do you miss the groggy feeling of waking up in a chair to the sound of the Star Spangled Banner? 
I always wanted Romper Stompers!
Yeah! The anthem, then the Indian, and then static. Then at dawn the farm report comes on.
national news wasn’t important, when it finally started it was 15 minutes, CBS took it to 30 minutes.
some markets would have only one or two stations. some might be affiliates of 2 or 3 of the 3 USA networks. it had only evening hours at the start (well before my time).
the national political conventions were hated by all kids. all three networks showed them from start to finish all day long.
Remember the Lassie before Jon Provost (Timmy) and June Lockhart?
Back then kids were allowed to go to game show tapings, and I actually got to see them do “Beat the Clock” as well as “To Tell the Truth” and “Whom do you Trust” with Johnny Carson and Ed McMahon. Carson made fun of the commercials during breaks.
“My Little Margie” creeped me out a bit even back then, since she called her father by his first name. I also watched “The Gale Storm” show (set on an ocean liner,) “Our Miss Brooks,” “Love That Bob,” and " The Peoples Choice" with Cleo, the talking basset hound who commented on the action.
They’ve got “Have Gun Will Travel” on Netflix, and I’ve been watching it since the beginning. Remarkably adult - when I was a kid I didn’t get half of it. Gene Roddenberry was a writer, and there are a lot of actors on there who showed up in Star Trek - not to mention that the Orion girl dance from the first pilot was taken from a Gypsy dance on Have Gun.
I’m watching them, too, on the Encore Western cable channel. The plots are quite sophisticated. I just saw the one with the Orion dance. Surprising how many of the stories were written by Gene Roddenberry.
I wasn’t around for the first days of television but when I was young color television was still considered “deluxe”, ABC was still the “new” network (and didn’t broadcast in my area), television stations went off the air at night, and you had to wait when you turned your TV on for the tubes to heat up.
Although I was around in the 50s, I don’t have any memories before the very earliest 60s. We always had a TV set – my father worked in broadcasting (radio and later televsion) – and I remember watching old B&W shows with my parents, many of the old early sitcoms such as The Real McCoys. I recall they were particularly fond of The Jimmy Dean Show, and I loved Rowlf the Dog. We got one of the early color sets in the mid-1960s.
Early 50’s. I mostly remember dicking around with the rabbit ears to try to get a decent picture. I don’t think we ever had a proper rooftop antenna.
I remember very little of the programming, except for a couple of local children’s shows, and one (maybe national) where you could put some clear plastic stuff on the screen and I’m not sure what next – draw on it? We were poor so I only saw this at friends’ houses.
About when did corporate sponsors get dropped from show titles, and the move to the modern commercial structure, happen?
I remember the early days of television in Australia. Our neighbours bought a set a few months before we got one (in about 1961, from memory - TV came to Oz in 1956) and we’d all troop down to their place in our pyjames and dressing gowns and watch their set. I believe we were invited but I suspect we’d all have gone anyway.
We had three channels in the early years, none of which began broadcasting until the afternoon. The very idea of morning television was beyond my ken. TV used to shut down about 10:30 or 11:00 pm, although I definitely wasn’t still up at that time. I could never work out what the test pattern was actually for because it looked to me as if it might be useful in tuning in the set, except that it was only shown in the wee small hours when no television repairman was likely to come to the house.
I have two other main memories: the dreaded black lines at the top and bottom of the screen, which would gradually widen until there was about two inches in the middle which was actually picture. We had to turn the set off for a couple of hours to let the valves cool down.
The other memory was of the News, which actually was news back then (not the drivel which commercial tv in Australia broadcasts today). And there were no ads in the news, not even between the news and the weather forecast. Halcyon days indeed.
I think the last to go was “Kraft Music Hall,” which lasted into the early '70s on NBC. (The only time I remember watching it was when Johnny Cash was the featured artist).
There were lots of them in the '50s; e.g., Martin and Lewis were sponsored by Colgate, Palmolive, and Camel Cigarettes. Even in the early '60s there were anthology series sponsored by Chrysler, Reynolds Aluminum, and so on. They had kind of petered out by about 1965.
One really good one I remember watching Sunday nights on CBS was, I think, sponsored by Alcoa. They often did historical docudramas like “The Assassination of Reinhard Heydrich.” I think it was on either just before or just after “Twilight Zone.”(This was 1961–62, IIRC.)