Turn the remote on your TV and a brilliant, perfect picture immediately appears in dazzling color. Click a few more times on the remote and hundreds – hundreds – of programs and multiple stations are at your fingertips.
It wasn’t always that way.
TVs were invented in 1927 and were first made available to the public in 1939, but it wasn’t until after the war that serious programming began, and it wasn’t until the mid-50s that TVs became affordable and made their way into many American living rooms. Televisions became the centerpiece of a room, often in elaborate wood cabinets. All was well and good except that TVs didn’t always perform as they should. Programs materialized with the sets by way of an antenna, often assisted with miniature indoor antennas called rabbit ears. If the wind blew the wrong way or clouds smothered the horizon, reception often suffered. It then became time to adjust two controls from hell – vertical and horizontal.
I was often the adjustor of said controls as the picture either rolled or twisted oddly to the side. On my knees like a skilled bank robber cracking a safe, I would gently turn the horizontal and sometimes put the actors and actresses in an upright position rather than listing a 45-degree angle. If you were lucky, the picture held steady until the National Anthem signaled the end of all programs. If not, you tried to get used to sideways people.
The vertical button was even more sinister. Sometimes the picture would roll and roll and continue to roll, occasionally slowing down, trying to trick you into thinking it had corrected itself.
But no. It began rolling again and the fine tuning of the knob was underway. Sometimes it was impossible to stop the rolling picture and a frantic phone call to the repairman set an appointment – often a week away. A new tube was inserted in the set and picture once more was steady.
There was another control knob on the set called “contrast”. This made a fuzzy picture a little less fuzzy. A new tube cleared the problem.
In the early days, we had two stations and half the time, especially during the day, there was nothing on the air. So we watched blank screens, eager for the next, usually awful, program.
The highlight of our day came at 4 o’clock when Howdy Doody, Buffalo Bob, and Clarabell entertained the vast young TV audience along with a handful of kids in the Peanut Gallery. We watched every second, every day, and hoped against hope we would not have to adjust either the horizontal or vertical control.