My paternal grandfather was really funny. He loved television and was the first person in his neighborhood to buy one. Pop-pop absolutely HATED commercials. It was the one thing he wouldn't tolerate.
We kids never had to be the "channel changer" my grandfather had a more ingenious method. He attached a long metal washline pole to the tv and could turn the volume down during the commercial and then resume the noise when the program returned.
In the 1960s, Pop got a remote control tv because apparently the technology improved. I later learned that the owner of the Zenith company wanted his engineers to develop "a device to tune out annoying commercials."
The one exception Pop had was the commercial that featured a giggling little boy inundated with puppies. I thought it was a Kodak commercial but the internet says it was a Pepsi one. I was older and it struck me as so odd that Pop actually liked a commercial. Do you remember that?
What childhood shows do you remember? My pop loved Mitch Miller and REALLY loved Lawrence Welk. We used to watch Mutual of Omaha Wild Kingdom at his house as well. We never watched Ed Sullivan...at home or at Pop's.
My Pop loved Lawrence Welk so much he used to tape the show on his reel-to-reel recorder and relisten to the show during the week.
I have been thinking about tv because recently a show came on youtube that featured Shari Lewis and Lambchop.
My brother and I LOVED Lambchop. We even insisted checking out Shari's and Lambchop's albums from the library. But...and don't laugh...I just found out that Lambchop was a puppet made from a sock. I never saw the sock. I so believed in the magic of that show that to me Lambchop was not a real animal but I couldn't see that he was hand made from a simple sock.
What was your favorite show when you were young?
Have a safe and happy day!
PS--this ad was misleading. We were never allowed to sit close to the color tv because we would get radiated or something.
That's probably Dinah Shore singing "See the USA, in your chevrolet..." Sorry if you have that song going through your head for the rest of the day....😁
TV memories! Enough for an entire post. My grandfather had a remote control in the 1950's. It worked with a wire/cord that ran under an area rug. In the early 2000's I met the man who invented the remote control. He was a physicist/engineer who worked for Zenith. (His wife was an AAUW colleague. What I remember from that brief meeting was that he was old (93 or so) and cranky.) [Robert Adler; he has a Wikipedia page.] In our house we had one TV in the famiy room. When I was on my own, living in an apartment in a small town where I didn't know many people, a friend gave the wise advice, "Even if you can't afford to buy food, get a TV. It will save your sanity. And lo and behold my parents gave me a Sears 19" color TV for my birthday. They had it delivered to the Sears store in that Texas town. And it did save my sanity.....After we were married (Stevens had an RCA console TV) I was able to sell that TV for $150, so it gave me some badly-needed extra money.....And now TVs, like microwaves, are ubiquitous and relatively cheap.
ReplyDeleteAs far as shows -- it's great that Tubi streams all the oldies. I'm still working my way (gradually) through Dick Van Dyke, Dobie Gillis, and Route 66. The writing back then was so good!
I didn't know TV existed until age 5 when we moved to garden apartments in NJ . The older boy next door had a TV. A deal was made. I could watch his TV if he could shoot my younger twin sisters with a cork gun. They weren't walking yet so we would stuff racoon tails in their diapers and shoot them as they crawled around the apartment. When colored TV became available, real fun happened because the color could be adjusted on the set. People could have green skin, etc. This was a hilarious past time even though I was then chronologically an adult. As a child I liked Lassie, Farmer Grey cartoons, Miss Frances on Ding Dong School, Howdy Doody. Loved when Senor Wences was on Ed Sullivan. Remember on that show when Elvis could be shown only from the waist up?
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