A Legacy Project

We had one television set. It was black and white. There was no remote. You had to get up and turn a knob to raise and lower the volume, get up and turn a different knob to change the channel, of which there were four: channel 5 (CBS), 6 (ABC), 12 (NBC), and 56 (UHF). If the picture was fuzzy, you moved the rabbit-ears antenna on top of the set (or the round antenna to better catch the UHF signal). 

It sat in the corner of the little dining room in our house on Main Street. If you got lucky and stayed home from school sick, you could watch tv all day. Mornings, after The Today Show and maybe I Love Lucy, it was all game shows:  Concentration, Truth or Consequences, Password, the Match Game, The Price Is Right. By noon you were bored. Afternoon was worse. The soap operas started:  As the World Turns, The Secret Storm, Love of Life, The Guiding Light, Search for Tomorrow, The Edge of Night. You almost wished you had gone to school. Because there was only one tv, there were control issues. My brother and I were forced to watch Lawrence Welk and Ed Sullivan. (There he was again, the talking mouse Toppo Giggio). My dad liked the Red Skelton Show, I think because Red was a reformed alcoholic who concluded every show saying “God Bless.” Not God bless you or God Bless America, it was a larger, more generous, all encompassing “bless” with no direct object. 

Occasionally, when the signal was interrupted, a test pattern showed on the tv screen, with the message PLEASE STAND BY. In a few minutes programming was restored.

For a week or so, in the fall of 1962 tv shows were regularly interrupted by somber-looking white men (it was always and only white men back in those days) who held forth in reports and press conferences. And then we went back to our regularly scheduled program. There was drama in the world (and on tv–The Secret Storm, Search for Tomorrow, The Edge of Night).  What our parents didn’t say was: “Boys, you might miss Gilligan’s Island tonight because of nuclear annihilation.” They didn’t let on that anything was up.