The TV Set

Have you ever picked cotton? Do you remember the first TV set you ever saw? Unless you grew up during the 1940’s or 1950’s in the south you probably can’t answer “yes” to both questions. You may wonder how these two totally unrelated questions might mesh together in one short article? During the next few paragraphs I plan to show you how it’s done.
My early teen years were spent during the late 1950’s in southern middle Tennessee. A local joke was that we were so far back in the “sticks” that the Grand ole Opry, a Saturday night radio tradition, did not arrive in our area until Sunday morning.
The high school I attended took two weeks off each October for what today would be called “fall vacation.” At that time in history it was referred to simply as “cotton pickin’ vacation.” Before mechanical cotton pickers were in common use people picked cotton. There was a good-sized labor pool in the local school of both good and bad quality. If your family didn’t raise cotton then you could “hire out” to farmers who did.
Dad gave my brother and me an acre of land down by the creek to use for whatever cash
crop we wanted to grow on it. It was not a prize piece of farm property since it was normally underwater due to the creek flooding during heavy rains. We planted cotton and in the fall as we picked the cotton we stored it in a shed until we got enough for a bale to take to the cotton gin to sell. A bale was a minimum of 450 pounds of ginned cotton. We not only worked during fall vacation but after school and on Saturdays. One good year we made two bales and had money to burn. We bought all our school clothes, saved some, and purchased a TV set for our family. Our family had never had one before. It was great! It was a nice black and white Sylvania with probably at least a 13” screen. We also bought an antenna system. We got two stations from Nashville and one more from Chattanooga by simply moving the antenna. I think that if Lawrence Welk’s show had been on 24 hours a day my folks would have probably watched it.
For younger readers if a station needed to be changed the viewer had to get up and turn the knob to change the channel and sometimes go outside to redirect the antenna. This was an early form of aerobic exercise. I consider myself to have been an early wireless remote. Dad would tell me which channel he wanted to watch and I would get up and turn the knob. I guess you could also say that I was also a voice-activated wireless remote. A very ahead of its time item for 1960. It was probably a guy like me who invented the TV remote?
When color TV first hit the market I remember our family going to the hardware store to see the new color TV set in the store window. This was a major event in our area. Perry Como had a Saturday night variety show that was broadcast in color and that is what we were going to see. The sidewalk crowd was fairly heavy in front of the large display window as show time neared.
Looking through the large window as the show began I was shocked to see that Perry Como was a green person who had strange clothing taste since he was wearing a fuzzy purple suit. For some reason the colors would blend and change as you watched. Sort of a rainbow effect.
My thought on walking away from the hardware store window after the show was that color TV would probably never be a success. It would more than likely never be more than a status symbol.