First TV show you ever watched (and can recall)

[LizzieMaine]

I often did. I called it "The Sign," with no apocalyptic implications. Our local "educational TV" channel didn't sign on until 5 in the afternoon, so I'd see a lot of it while waiting for "The Friendly Giant" to come on. They'd run The Sign for twenty-five minutes starting at 4:30, and then at 4:55 you'd get a series of title cards reading "Five Minutes", "Four Minutes," and so on until the sign-on announcement.

I'd also see the commercial station sign-on in the morning, which immediately preceded a five minute "sermonette" called "The Open Door," introduced with a title card showing -- an open door. Local ministers would take turns delivering these little bromides, and would conclude with a prayer before Jack LaLanne took over. All very tranquil and dignified, and much preferable to the "No Evil Oil" infomercials you see in the wee hours nowadays.

 

[Dixie_Amazon]

Did anyone else get up early and just watch the test pattern until programming began?

Yes I did. I remember Jack Lalanne too, I watched it with my mom. She exercised and I ran around den. [video=youtube_share;y61Bz5JxD-s]http://youtu.be/y61Bz5JxD-s[/video]

 

[Stanley Doble]

Happy the white Alsatian.

In our house children were not allowed to touch the television. A grown up turned it on, you watched what they watched (westerns if there was one on) and when they were through watching they turned it off.

Same deal with the phone. My mother was astonished to find that her grand daughter knew how to make a phone call at the age of 9.

 

[Horace Debussy Jones]

I think the first thing I watched was just any and all cartoons. Warner Bros. on Saturday morning, Hercules, The Pink Panther, Casper the Friendly Ghost,...and the list goes on.
I think I might just be the only person NOT frightened by those flying monkeys. I was intrigued by them.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The flying monkeys were nothing. The flaming head of Oz was terrifying. Imagine my surprise when I figured out it was just Frank Morgan in disguise.

 

[filfoster]

Assuming anyone posting born before 1960 something only had black and white TV, how many stations could you get? We lived in a rural suburb of Cincinnati, and got three local 'network' stations, one Public Broadcasting station and on a clear day and no solar flares, might pull in a Dayton, OH station, with lots of static.

 

[filfoster]

I often did. I called it "The Sign," with no apocalyptic implications. Our local "educational TV" channel didn't sign on until 5 in the afternoon, so I'd see a lot of it while waiting for "The Friendly Giant" to come on. They'd run The Sign for twenty-five minutes starting at 4:30, and then at 4:55 you'd get a series of title cards reading "Five Minutes", "Four Minutes," and so on until the sign-on announcement.


I'd also see the commercial station sign-on in the morning, which immediately preceded a five minute "sermonette" called "The Open Door," introduced with a title card showing -- an open door. Local ministers would take turns delivering these little bromides, and would conclude with a prayer before Jack LaLanne took over. All very tranquil and dignified, and much preferable to the "No Evil Oil" infomercials you see in the wee hours nowadays.

Our local network stations would begin broadcasting around 5:30 or 6:00 AM; the test pattern (the sign) would abruptly disappear as a film clip of the American flag running up a flagpole appeared to the sounds of the Star Spangled Banner played 'quick time'. What followed was usually the farm report or a GED program or I assume no-royalties film clips on 'Making Chocolate Candy Bars' or life on Israeli Kibbutz's. Cartoons began around 7:00 AM.

 

[53Effie]

Friday Night Fights, the Gillette Cavalcade of Sports. My dad was a boxing fan and although we did not yet have a tv, a family friend often had us over. Other than boxing, the first show I remember is Highway Patrol with Broderick Crawford. I think it must have been on Friday too. This was in the mid fifties.

 

[Atticus Finch]

I remember watching Highway Patrol. It ran until 1959, so I would have been three or four at the end of the series, depending on when during 1959 it ended.

Television wasn't huge in our house in those days. We could only receive two channels and one of them not reliably. We'd be watching TV when something would change with the weather, and our program would slowly dissolve to static.

AF

 

[LizzieMaine]

We had three stations, 2, 5 and 7, but 7 didn't come on the air until 1965, and had a very poor signal. The Educational TV station, channel 12, was run by the University of Maine and was only on six hours a day. Sunspot reception sometimes brought us CHSJ, channel 4, in St. John, New Brunswick.

Sunspot activity peaked in June and July every year, and during one such extravaganza I picked up Channel 3 out of Mason City, Iowa.


Maine had no television at all until late 1953, when the licensing freeze was lifted, and most people here didn't get television sets until 1954-55. Prior to 1953, teleivison was almost entirely a phenomenon of the urban areas along the East and West coasts, and parts of the Midwest.

 

[filfoster]

Friday Night Fights, the Gillette Cavalcade of Sports. My dad was a boxing fan and although we did not yet have a tv, a family friend often had us over. Other than boxing, the first show I remember is Highway Patrol with Broderick Crawford. I think it must have been on Friday too. This was in the mid fifties.

I found a few seasons on DVD of Highway Patrol. Is there a better time machine to the 1950's?

 

[filfoster]

We had three stations, 2, 5 and 7, but 7 didn't come on the air until 1965, and had a very poor signal. The Educational TV station, channel 12, was run by the University of Maine and was only on six hours a day. Sunspot reception sometimes brought us CHSJ, channel 4, in St. John, New Brunswick.

Sunspot activity peaked in June and July every year, and during one such extravaganza I picked up Channel 3 out of Mason City, Iowa.


Maine had no television at all until late 1953, when the licensing freeze was lifted, and most people here didn't get television sets until 1954-55. Prior to 1953, teleivison was almost entirely a phenomenon of the urban areas along the East and West coasts, and parts of the Midwest.

Recall the size of the TV box vs the screen on those early models?

 

[LizzieMaine]

My television set is a 1954 RCA Victor, which was one of the first sets purchased in my home town. It has a 17 inch tube, which was the entry-level model that year. The top of the line sets had 21 inch screens.

I've also got a 1948 Firestone set in my office, with a 7-inch tube mounted in a cabinet about two feet wide and a foot high.

 

[vitanola]

My earliest memory is of television. I recall sitting in my high chair watching my mother cradle my baby brother whilst crying and staring at the television screen. Mom was never a weepy person, as so this was a rather unsettling scene. We later figured out that this took place n the afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963. Mom always watched "As The World Turns", you see...

[video=youtube;Oiznn7id7zg]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oiznn7id7zg&feature=youtube_gdata_player [/video]

 

[1mach1]

Not sure, but Hee Haw was one of the first for sure.

[video=youtube;WJZY__j0Tyk]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJZY__j0Tyk[/video]

 

[filfoster]

My television set is a 1954 RCA Victor, which was one of the first sets purchased in my home town. It has a 17 inch tube, which was the entry-level model that year. The top of the line sets had 21 inch screens.

I've also got a 1948 Firestone set in my office, with a 7-inch tube mounted in a cabinet about two feet wide and a foot high.

Wow! Does that thing still work? Can you get it serviced? That's vacuum tube technology. It's hard to believe anyone is still around who can work on these.

 

[dh66]

Not sure, but Hee Haw was one of the first for sure.

[video=youtube;WJZY__j0Tyk]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJZY__j0Tyk[/video]

EVERY Saturday evening. Right after Lawrence Welk. I don't think my Dad ever missed a single episode.
And on Sunday evenings, Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, often followed by Wonderful World of Disney.

 

[Stanley Doble]

We had one of the first TVs in Canada, from 1952, the year the first TV station went on the air in Toronto and the year after I was born. So there was always a TV in the house.

It had about a 17 inch screen and around 1953 or 54, my father built it into the wall so I don't know what brand it was.

We moved house in 1959 and got a bigger (black and white) TV that lasted us into the 70s. I don't remember seeing color TV until the late seventies or possibly the 1980s. For example, I was surprised recently to discover that the last few seasons of Beverley Hillbillies was in color, I only saw it in black and white.

At that time there were 3 or 4 stations we could usually get, from Peterborough and Toronto Ontario and across Lake Ontario from Rochester and sometimes Buffalo. Depending on the weather, we might even get a few more but reception was very bad other than the closest 3 or 4, and they did not come in well at times.

 

[DNO]

I used to watch the usual run of Saturday morning cartoons and I certainly remember watching The Lone Ranger and Sergeant Preston ("On King!"). Sky King and Robin Hood were favourites as well. We were fairly lucky in Toronto as far as stations. We received three American stations from Buffalo (ahh...the Commander Tom Show from WKBW was a regular) as well as one Hamilton station and two Toronto stations. Six stations. Probably more than are worth watching today.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Wow! Does that thing still work? Can you get it serviced? That's vacuum tube technology. It's hard to believe anyone is still around who can work on these.

It does, and I can. I salvaged the set from the dump in my hometown in 1986. The neck of the picture tube had snapped off, but I knew someone who had been a TV repairman, and he had a field behind his house filled with junked sets. He let me poke around out there until I found a 17HP4 picture tube, swapped it in, and got it working well enough to see what else I needed to do. I replaced all the capacitors, put in a new horizontal output tube, and it's been working reliably ever since. About ten years ago I burned up a resistor in the audio circuit, but that was easy enough to fix, and was the only time it's been out of the cabinet since the original restoration.