The last few years of their lives, unfortunately, the TV was always on Fox News. (Unless my little cousin was over, they’d change it to Discovery Channel for him.) My grandma particularly loved Bill O’Reilly. Other than that, they were amazing people.
Gods, but I miss them.
I really don’t think my maternal grandfather ever watched anything but sports. At all. No, wait, I remember news being on once in a while, and I remember the Watergate hearings being on.
On the other side of the family (my paternal grandmother), I’m amazed that I never realized this before, but she didn’t have a television. I’m going through the whole house (well, apartment) in my mind right now and nope, no television.
Chilly Billy Cardille, Pie Traynor, and “who can, ameri-can plumbing and heating”.
Heh. I ran into Bruno Samartino ten years or so ago. Very nice guy.
Grandma’s sister, Great Aunt Dolly, loved her some Charles Bronson. She invited me over to her house a few years ago to watch a Death Wish marathon. She was 86 at the time.
Bowling for Dollars. Grandma loved it.
He is a man. At least I think he is. I’ve never actually seen his penis.
My great-grandma Margaret loved midget wrestling, too! The strange thing was, she was terrified of little people. She’d get anxious in grocery stores if she thought a little person was stalking her.
my parents would on Thursday nights watch The Hollywood Squares and The Waltons. The Hollywood Squares aired on NBC while The Waltons aired on CBS. Wednesday Nights, they’d watch Treasure Hunt and then Little House on the Prairie but they both were on NBC
The only thing I remember Pop-Pop watching on TV was the Pittsburgh Pirates of Major League Baseball. (He also watched the World Series. That wasn’t intended as a burn.) He often fell asleep watching the games.
My grandfather was born in 1864, my grandmother 2 years later, so the strangest thing they ever watched would have been any TV at all. (My grandparents on my mother’s side were born in the 1880s so still no TV).
And, yes, such threads do make me feel damned old (I’m 67).
Nice to see this thread back in play! I missed some of the earlier answers and caught up with them tonight.
My maternal grandmother, who died in 1984, loved watching cartoons. I was little, so I thought she watched them because of me, but when I was older I learned that she’d watched them alone too. My mom often said that if she’d only lived a little longer she would’ve loved VCRs because then she could’ve watched all the cartoons she wanted on demand.
My maternal grandfather loved roller derby and American Gladiators. He, Dad, and I used to watch Creature Double Features when I was small, too.
As for the other grandparents… I never met my maternal grandmother but I’m told she was a big hockey fan the last several years of her life.
Grandma, born 1886, liked Welk and the White Sox, to my eternal shame.
What kind of cartoons did she watch? Were they the classic Disney, Fleischer, and Warner Brothers/Looney Tunes or the then-contemporary stuff from the 60s,70s, and 80s?
My grandfather traveled a lot before he was married, and was a newspaper reporter, back when that was a job you got by being a copy boy, and then a cub reporter, then getting a few real stories. At some point, he became friends with Forrest Tucker. I don’t know the whole backstory there, although I think it had something to do with one of his fellow reporters at one paper having gone to high school with him, and it turned out Tucker and my grandfather both collected coins, so they really hit it off.
But at any rate, they remained they equivalent of “Facebook” friends all their lives, which meant, that my grandfather sent him a Christmas card (as a matter of professionalism, my grandfather sent out a lot of them), and they looked each other up if one happened to be in town.
It also meant that any time F-Troop was on, we watched. My grandfather even got cable in the late 70s when one of the channels started airing it regularly.
Oh, my maternal grandmother, who only recently died, at the age of 98 1/2, loved The Golden Girls. She really identified with women of their ages who got out and did things, and were sexually active.
She also, for some reason I can’t fathom, loved Everybody Loves Raymond. I have no idea why, but I got her the third season on DVD, and she was thrilled. She was a wonderful mother-in-law, but maybe she liked Doris Roberts a little as an assimilated Jew. My grandmother wasn’t assimilated in the sense that she tried to hide being Jewish, but she wanted to have lots of friends from every walk of life. It sounds weird now, but back in the 1960s, my grandmother was proud to have friends who were, black, Chinese, Korean, Catholic, and every variety of Protestant, as well as all kinds of Jews. I hope that doesn’t sound offensive to people, but my grandmother was born in 1917, and was really very progressive. She wasn’t even homophobic. She liked to listed to KD Lang, because she reminded her of Patsy Cline, and her private life was no one else’s business. She even criticized Reagan back in the 80s for not addressing the AIDS crisis.
Haven’t thought of Chilly Billy in years. Always thought it was great that his daughter and granddaughter are CMU Drama graduates.
The only two jokes I remember from*** Hee-Haw***:
(1) *“I crossed a caterpillar with a Japanese beetle.”
“Whad’ya get?”
“A kamikaze butterfly!”*
(2) *“My wife wanted t’keep pigs in th’ house.”
"Why don’tcha let her?
“Can’t stand th’ smell!”
“Why don’tcha open th’ window?”
“Whut?!? And let th’ chickens out?!?”*
Maternal grandparents born 1892 and 1895. Got dumped at their house as a kid in the late '60s so parents could party on Sundays.
Welk, definitely. Also the usual other Old People shows of the time – Beverly Hillbillies, Red Skelton, etc. Occasionally some more contemporary, like Here Come the Brides. On “Sunday Night at the Movies” saw all kinds of good shit…Bridge Over the River Kwai, A Hard Day’s Night. The weirdest movie was Kisses for my President, a 1964 flick about the first woman Prez.
I had one grandmother who loved the Black and White Minstrel Show. Mostly it would be on the TV in the TV room and she would sing along while she did stuff around the house.