By G. Michael Dobbs
news@thereminder.com
Since I was born in 1954, I was in the middle of the Baby Boom generation when it came to television.
Clearly I missed the beginning of the TV era – 1949 – but I am still old enough to recall much of the early days of the medium.
For many of us in our generation, TV was a medium with certain limitations – limitations that to young people today must seem almost unimaginable.
In this era of cable TV, streaming platforms and local stations having multiple digital channels, the TV of my youth clearly must seem like the Stone Age.
First, it was in black and white. Color sets were both a novelty and quite expensive. My folks didn’t get a color set until the mid-1970s.
Second, for many people the number of choices for channels depended on several factors. If you lived in a large city you probably had the three networks and a couple of independent stations. If you lived in the greater Springfield area, you could probably get 22, 40 and 3. On a good day perhaps the station from New Haven or the UHF stations from Hartford.
Third, if you didn’t have a good antenna mounted on the roof of your home, you had to rely on “rabbit ears” – an antenna on top of the TV set that often required readjustment for each station. Many times you added a strip of aluminum foil to the rabbit ears to boost its powers.
Fourth, watching TV required actually getting out of your seat to change the channel or adjust the volume.
Fifth, many homes had one TV, so determining what to watch was a frequent subject of conversation in homes.
Okay those were the major conditions under which TV operated and we accepted all of them unquestioningly.
The concept of cable TV was born out of communities in areas with poor reception due to geographic concerns. A community antenna was constructed and literally people used that to receive TV signals. It took decades for cable TV, as we know it now to be developed.
Unlike today, there was a greater emphasis on local programming. Local TV stations actually produced their own content. It wasn’t just the news – the broadcasts I saw as a kid were 15 minutes in length, compared to the bloated 90 minutes today. There were “women’s” shows, such as “At Home with Kitty” – a label that is outmoded today – as well as shows for kids.
I watched the “Hap Richards Show” and “The Ranger Andy Show” from Channel 3 in Hartford and “The Wicky Wacky Cloud Club” on 22. I had a certificate from the Hap Richards show that I was a citizen of “Joyville” and a membership card from the “The Wicky Wacky Cloud Club,” which I carried proudly in my Donald Duck plastic wallet.
A side note here: my family never watched the news on Channel 3 because it was Connecticut-based. The one time we did I was shocked to find out that Hap Richards was actually doing night duty as sportscaster Floyd Richards.
Channel 40 had a “Bozo the Clown” show for a while as well as “The Admiral and Swabby Show.”
All of these programs mixed local talent with cartoons or two-reel comedies – such as those made by Laurel and Hardy – or puppetry. They all had a studio audience of kids.
Nope, I was never on one of them.
By the time I was in high school I was a fledging movie lover and the local channels provided me with the opportunity of seeing a ton of films from the 1930s and ‘40s. Channel 22 featured local film buff Hal Stanton hosting a variety of films, while Channel 30 from Connecticut featured Saturday night horror film show hosted by “Svenghoulie.”“Saturday Night Live” bumped that show off the air.
Locally the TV stations mirrored the type of programming offered by the networks, but on their own terms. Local stations had to live up to programming requirements set by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) as part of their license.
Local shows also gave the stations opportunities to sell additional advertising.
With the rise of cable TV, as well as changes in FCC rules and the expectations of audiences, most of this local programming became fodder for nostalgia. Today, there are some locally based programs on local commercial TV, but the bulk of the local programming is on public TV and cable access television.
This era in TV lives now only in the memories of those of us who were glued to the TV during our childhood.
G. Michael Dobbs is the managing editor of Reminder Publishing LLC, and Prime’s local columnist.
