50s: Living by the TV

The television grew steadily more important. By the late fifties we had a bigger black and white set in the family room. We gathered — parents and kids old enough, Chip and Me — to watch Gunsmoke, Disneyland, Perry Mason, Twilight Zone, Bonanza. We built Friday and Saturday nights around the shows. For Perry Mason we played a game guessing the culprit every week. We had to write our guesses down and drop them in a copper pot near the TV before Perry Mason revealed the guilty, always in the last five minutes. And we watched College Bowl and guessed the answers and learned about Oberlin and Pomona College. Quiz shows were big too, once a week extravaganza in prime time. And we still had to be there on time and sit through the commercials to watch the shows. There were no replays or second chances. So, we were there, as the TV demanded, at the appointed times. Or we didn’t see the show.

Television brought us football. That was a Dad thing. The San Francisco forty-niners, pro football, televised the away games. I learned football from Dad, and watched with Chip and by the time he was 6, Jay too. We dove into the TV, ate it up, analyzed every play, read the sports page every day, debated everything, and enjoyed the hell out of it.

We had three main choices for TV. NBC on channel 4, CBS on 5, or ABC on 7. Plus a local independent on channel 2 and KQED, PBS, on 9. They broadcast from 5 or 6 in the morning until 11 or 12 at night. They signed off with a patriotic message and ran a test pattern through the night. All TV came through an antenna on the roof.