My First T.V.
Experience
By L.J. Ehrlich,
Class of 1953,
Follett High
School
Every small town has at least one man that when something
goes wrong they call him.
He is the Mr. Fix It. If the faucet drips,
call Mr. Fix It, if the fridge doesn't work, call Mr. Fix It, if the
lights don't come on, call Mr. Fix It, if the radio doesn't plan,
call Mr. Fix It.
Noble was the man.
He was Mr. Fix It in Follett. His full name was
Noble Brown, he was married, had a dedicated wife, (Madelene and two
lovely daughters, (Sandra and Jean Ann). As a family they were
respected and admired in the community. But to top
it all off, if it could be fixed, Noble could fix it!
In 1951, (think the year is right) no one if Follett had yet
bought a T.V. We had
heard about them through the newspapers, and radio. Noble had a radio
repair shop where he fixed all kinds of radios, and anything
electronic. He
probably had the only ohm meter in town and probably was the only
one that knew what an ohm was.
(For those of you who might no know, an Ohm is harmless, it
is a measurement of electrical resistance)
I remember he had a red sign to scare us kids over his work
bench that read:
WARNING, DO NOT TOUCH, 100,000
OHMS!
Wow, we all stayed clear. I didn't realize until
years later ohms are
harmless, but it scared the dickens out of us and
served its purpose.
Noble had a ham radio license. He had a big (I mean big,
Hammarlund 15 tube short wave radio that easily weighed 50 pounds
had at least 12 dials, several toggle switches and an very long
antennae (we called it an aerial) that draped from a light pole by
his shop and traveled clear across his lot about 100 foot to another
pole. As he would
slowly turn the dial you would hear mostly short wave beeps and
squeals and squawks and sometimes someone who sounded like Donald
Duck. I was
fascinated. Noble was
something else. I guess
in my mind he could walk on the water if he wanted to. It was
at this time I set a goal in my mind to become a Ham Radio Operator
and years later I earned my license! My ham radio licenses number
is KB5UI (Killed By 5
Ugly Indians) and still good.
My wife Ida also has her Ham license and it is WB5IFS (Willy Baker Five
India Foxtrot Sugar).
We don’t have a ham radio anymore, but someday, who
knows?
Well, back to the Television. Noble bought a
Television set, James Byars, Dub and I helped him unpack
it. He didn't know
enough to buy a TV. antennae but who would care, Noble had
plenty of aerial wire! We would try it
out that very night as the world champion boxing championship with
Jersey Joe Walcott and Ezzard Charles was being broadcast from
Amarillo (125 miles Southwest and
Oklahoma
City 150
miles to the Southeast).
We would have plenty of height as we would set it up in a top
room of the New Follett Cement Grain Elevator about 150 feet
high.
I remember we had to make several trips up and down the small
elevator taking the T.V. and needed materials up to the top.
In a room at the top, we set up the TV and Noble stretched
the twin lead wire up to the top through the attic door and on to
the roof where he had made his own T.V. Antennae. He made if from cane
fishing poles and black electric tape! Looked pretty good to
me, of course I had never seen one before and had no idea what it
should have looked like!
If you can imagine the twin lead wire being strapped with
black tape every 12 inches or so to the fishing cane poles, you
have a pretty good description of the antennae. Noble had done a good
job. It should
work? But would
it? I was confident it
would work as Noble could fix anything.
That night we turned on the T.V., pointed the fishing
pole aerial toward Amarillo and immediately received a full screen of snow
and a loud hissing sound.
We changed channels, more of the same, we moved the aerial
more, of the same, we thought maybe it would take a while for it to
warm up, we waited, more snow and more loud hissing! It
was hard to listen to, but we did. We were scared we
would miss it so left the sound up.
We switched our viewing direction to OK. City. They were having a
snow storm there too, in fact it seemed as if
Amarillo and Oklahoma
City were
both in the middle of a gigantic snow storms that was messing up our
T. V. Maybe they hadn’t
started broadcasting yet?
Or had they had cancelled the fight? Or maybe it was a short
fight and we missed it!
Not knowing, we would not give up; we switched, rotated the
fishing pole antennae, stared at the oval shaped screen and waited
patiently for a picture or a sound. We did this for 2-3
hours. May I tell you
that my eyes watered a lot and my ears got tired of hearing the loud
hiss?
I will confess there was one time we had been staring at the
snow and listening to the loud hissing sound for quite some time
when I thought I could see an image moving in the back of the snowy
screen and once I thought I heard a sound, but then it was
gone. That was the best
we would do for that night.
We had attempted
to make history in Follett; we had attempted the first Television
show in Follett and not succeeded. I had serious doubts
about it all.
We all agreed that Television had a long way to go before it
would actually work. In my heart I thought I would never see
it work. Maybe it wasn't even true. Maybe television was
just a hoax. Just maybe we had been hoodwinked!
Several months later Noble had fine tuned the T.V. set with a
proper aerial and could actually get a partial picture and decent
sound if the conditions were right.
Not long after that there were T.V. transponders placed in
southern Kansas (Ensign, Kansas) and in the Texas Panhandle close to
Libscomb, and on some good nights with the atmospheric conditions
just right you could watch “good” television for short periods
of time before the picture would just "vanish without
warning".
The common expression at the post office and at the
local cafe each morning that was commonly heard, “Boy did you have
your T.V. on last night between 8 and 8:30?
It was unbelievable!
It was clear as a bell and no noise! Someone else
would say, I had mine on and I got
nothing!
BUT . . . We had
color TV in Follett before the rest of the world did! Well, to be perfectly
honest it was not true color, it was kinda colored. This is how we colored
it. We soon
learned that if you took a piece of colored cellophane paper and
stretched it over your screen and fastened it with scotch tape you
would have color. We
didn’t care if it was all blue, or all green, or even red, it was
color. If you
grew tired of the color just change the paper! It sure did cut down the
glare of the “snow” that was prevalent with the black and white
screen. It was a change
and it was a little relaxing for a while.
Later Noble got a real color set and ou la la, people would
gather on the sidewalk in front of his store at night and stare
through the front store window to see the color television set. Lawrence Welk would
say “and ah von, and ah two,” and it was just great!
TV’s back
then cost $300-$600 or more and the only good ones were Philco
and Sylvania. Today you can’t buy
either brand and there are dozens of great TV’s at half the
cost. Now that’s
progress!
Well, back then we knew about small radios and tiny TV’s on
wrists! But to see one
you had to read about them in comic fiction books (Captain Marvel
and Dick Tracy had one) and no one believed such a thing could ever
happen! It was all make
believe, fiction, not true, not even possible! But, Sha-zaam!
Today we have the small
wrist TV’s, radios, telephones, and at a price even children on an
allowance can afford them.
Anyone want to buy a ticket to the moon? Mars? No way! Scuttlebutt says they are
going on sale soon.