After living in this house
a few years I reached a point when I had to make some changes. I was working
nights so paying for 150 channels with nothing on didn’t make a lot of
sense. Mainly because I wasn’t home to
watch anything I was interested in and I didn’t have a way to record it at the
time. So I kicked loose from cable TV for
almost 2 years, it was too costly for what I was getting out of it,
though I kept the internet. I would just watch the shows I wanted online when I
got home at night, plus I could pause it when I wanted to so it worked real
well for a while. With football season
approaching I had to do something and decided to break down and get one of
those TV signal converters plus a set of rabbit ears to see what I could pull
in for TV. I could get the local network channels that carried football except
the NBC affiliate, which wasn’t a great loss though I was surprised I couldn’t ever
get the local PBS station. Reception ranged between pretty good and meh most of the time, though all bets were off during dust storms. I somehow managed to
pull in, at least from the antennae’s point of view, a “total” of 63 channels,
of which I watched about 7 or 8 if I could get them to come in. The rest
consisted of a rather eclectic mess that for some interesting channel surfing if nothing else.
There were 7 or 8 that were basically nothing more than the flea races with
sound, it was toss up about what you
heard sound wise, sometimes they were in English, some times in Spanish. Another group of a dozen or so consisted of
religious or evangelical channels in various and sundry forms. Any one that has
known me any length of time knows I’m about as religious as a bucket of paint
and only darken the doors of a church for weddings and funerals, so they were
pretty much out of my wheelhouse. The
remaining 30 odd stations were all in Spanish, some religion based others just
regular TV and since my high school Spanish is very rusty at best I didn’t last
long watching those and trying translate on the fly. My main TV fare consisted of ancient reruns from the fairly early days of television.
I’ve rarely met
anyone that doesn’t recall the TV shows of their youth with some degree of
fondness, though I‘ll tell ya watching these shows now it’s easy to notice how
low budget they really were. From a
kid’s point of view this was cool stuff and I wonder how adults from that era
thought about what was filling the small screen. Catching some of the old shows here and there
is a reminder of simpler times and simpletons. Seriously who grew up
during the 60’s & 70’s and didn’t see every episode of Gilligan’s Island and
Leave It to Beaver about 4,000 times. Watching all that TV I don’t know how I managed
to read all the books I did, so maybe I‘m a little odd, just maybe. I remember
as a kid we had a box on top of the TV we called the rotor that was connected
to a motor up on the antenna. You had to turn the dial to specific points
marked on it to get certain channels to come in. We only were able to get about
5 since we didn’t live in an area close enough to any of the UHF stations;
those were the channel numbers above 13.
Cable didn't make an appearance in my area until I was heading to high school. The world has definitely moved on.
Into this epic
conglomeration sitting atop my TV set walked the woman that is now my
wife. The first time she was at my house
and we decided to watch TV she had a look of utter surprise that I didn’t have
cable. I exposed her to the joy that is
over the air TV, she wasn’t impressed.
The typical offering late at night after Craig Ferguson ended was
usually an infomercial and there weren’t a lot of other choices. The most
palatable enough to watch usually consisted of Highway Patrol and Sea Hunt,
with an occasional Mr. Ed or Bat Masterson thrown in. Mr. Ed got a pass of course, he’s a horse and
horses are cool, plus he is still funny after all these years. The others left her wondering why I watched
this stuff. I pointed out to her that these shows were from the late 50’s &
early 60’s, essentially the stuff I grew up watching, when everything was in
black & white and television as an industry wasn’t much more than a
teenager. Sophistication in TV land then
wasn’t as important as just putting something on that folks may watch and
sponsors could manage to try and sell stuff. I always liked it when Alfred
Hitchcock groused and sighed about having to go to a commercial., just like we do now. We would watch
and giggle over the impossible stuff that occurred in episode after episode. and the obvious low production sets. The PSAs at the end of Highway Patrol were always special,
“ Remember to give blood at the blood bank not on the
freeway” and “ Leave the clowns at the circus don’t be one on the highway” we’re our favorites.
As our
relationship progressed we spent many a Sunday and Monday watching football at
her place. She had cable and her TV wasn’t a refuge from the Clinton era. When we made the decision to share living
space she insisted that the rabbit ears go, which required very little arm
twisting and not long after she parked her desk and her clothes in the third
bedroom, the dish went up on the end of the trailer. NFL Sunday ticket is great
way to OD on football in the fall, though we now have 200 channels and there’s
still nothing on; thank the universe for the DVR.
We do still catch Mr. Ed from time to time. After all, a horse is horse of course, of course.
