do you remember when.........

[musclehead]

( shoot I forgot who I was talking to, some of you remember the golden age of radio.  )

do you remember when a "TV" was a piece of furniture?   thats right I'm talking the long dead console TV the ones that would take up an entire wall of your living room and only have a 20" screen. those days if you wanted to be buried in your TV it was doable, I'd like to see someone buried in a LCD flat panel.

you could cover one with a table cloth and use it as a side board for your next family get together or pot luck. all those vacuum tubes would keep your side dishes warm, one winter our furnace went out and we warmed our hands over the TV.

and thats another thing people today are all worried about 'emissions' from our cell phones giving us a brain tumor. I wonder what kind of radiation we were getting from watching I love lucy? must not have been too bad I never grew a third arm out of my forehead or couldn't go to sleep because I was glowing in the dark.

those TV's had about 3549 buttons, switches, dials and toggles, no telling what they were all for. I'd like to see one of them today I bet there is a button for 'space' and one for 'time' and the next says 'continuim'.

I got up early one saturday morning when i was about 6 or 7 long before 24 hour programing and the cartoon network. all i know was 1. it was broad daylight. 2. there was no Johnny Quest on. 3. I needed to 'fix' the TV.  I tinkered with all the controls and when the program started I could hear it only. about that time my dad walks out and says 'what did you do to the TV?' instead of whooping my butt beet red he just fixed it and told me not to tinker with it.

I managed not to screw it up for 3-4 weeks and this time I noticed there were even MORE controls on the back. I hosed it up REAL good it took him 3 hours to fix it, he started shooting me daggers every time he looked up. lesson learned this time he told me if I ever touched ANYTHING but the on/off switch I wouldn't sit down for a month. he was way to leinient on us boys

[Fatboyman05]

I remember the old tv that was bigger than a bufet hutch. do you remember your first VCR, I bought one in 86 and it literally had dials to adjust the individual chanels, like a plus and minus. it adjusted so far you could set it for chanel four and tune in chanel 5, then again we only got 3 chanels and pbs when the weather was right........

[RiderNJ]

At my house,  we use to say dad was a real inovator...
First remote control -  "Hey,  one of you kids put on channel 3."
Picture in picture -  putting the 13" b/w tv on top of the big 20" console tv


We were also the first on the block with video games... pong.
Had the whole block in our house that weekend taking turns playing pong.   We were also the first to have the lines from the video burned into the screen so you could see them on every channel, on every show.

[BF]

I remember those days well.  The parental units had one of those huge wooden consoles with the Zenith black & white 20" in the middle, a Hi Fidelity turn table on one side and an AM/FM stero on the other. 

Remember watching the Beatles play "I wanna hold your hand" live on Ed Sullivan on that thing.  I think I was about 12.  Route 66, Gun Smoke, Then Came Bronson.....all of those old shows.  Dem was da days.   

[ptgb]

Remember the TV antenna rotor box on top of the TV?

"Click...click...click" the dial.... then "kadunk...kadunk...kadunk" as the antenna rotated.

Kids would always get yelled at if they spun the dial too fast... "quit doing it so fast, you'll break it."

[valkmc]

How about the first microwe wave, I think the front tire off the valk would have fit in it, it cost me $500 and my parents swore we were being nuked everytime we used it. Costly time $500 for the microwe wave and $600 for the VCR.

[hubcapsc]

Remember the TV antenna rotor box on top of the TV?

Yeah, my neighbors had that... they could get channel 13 (ABC) out of Asheville! Our TeeVee changed
channels with pliers.

-Mike

[solo1]

How about the first microwe wave, I think the front tire off the valk would have fit in it, it cost me $500 and my parents swore we were being nuked everytime we used it. Costly time $500 for the microwe wave and $600 for the VCR.

I still have my Amana 'radarange' microwave.  How well I remember that.  I had just bought a Yamaha SR500 for my reentry into the motorcycling world and my wife wasn't happy.  I went out and bought the Amana for $500.00 to satisfy her.  The microwave is still being used and yes, it is big and heavy.

The SR500 is long gone. My wife died 9 years ago.  Everytime I use the microwave, it brings back memories.

[scoot]

My dad had one that was close to 6 feet long. It had a 25" color tv, AM/FM stereo, turn table and the newest thing, a quadra Phonic 8 track player. It all kinds of storge in the bottom of it. There were doors that slid back and forth to cover the stoage and tv. I think there were 2 small speakers in each end that were covers with red velvet fabric. By time my dad passed he had filled that thing with 8 tracks from anything you could imagine. ( remember he bought an Alice Cooper thinking it was a female country singer  ) Man he was proud of that stereo entertainment center.

[John Schmidt]

We didn't buy our first TV until I was about to graduate from high school...and it had a round tube. All the early ones had that I guess. Dad used to love to watch wrestling, and I used to like to watch him watching it. He'd really get into it and squirm all over the couch while it appeared someone was about to get slammed. I was home on leave from the USAF one time and the TV was kaput. He was all upset because it meant missing his wrestling that weekend. Since my work in the service was in electronics I figured I'd take a look at it. As I recall, some tube had gone south which caused the fly-back transformer to crap out. There was also some kind of buffer built in that was supposed to prevent all that...don't remember what it consisted of. I picked up a Sam's Photofacts schematic, bought some parts with better tolerances and got it up and running in time for his show that night. Funny part of that is.....it never broke down again and he kept that TV for another ten years until mom threw it out one day while he was at work.

When I was stationed in northern Maine, I had a series of homemade antennas for different channels. We had one mounted on top of a fir tree in the driveway, probably 40' high, and aimed at a Canadian station. Came in real clear, my wife at the time got the surprise of her life when a program came on showing full nudity. Aaaah....the good old days!!!   

[slider]

hated to see disney  come on sunday evening,had to go to bed early next day was school..I was the in resident remote control for my parents...wouldnt trade the memories for anything

[hubcapsc]

hated to see disney  come on sunday evening,had to go to bed early next day was school..I was the in resident remote control for my parents...wouldnt trade the memories for anything

My Daddy watched every single western that ever came on, and I always watched too. I watched
Bonanza... I think it came on at 9:00pm Sunday night, or maybe at 8:00, right after Disney...

He missed a few years of Gunsmoke... he let me watch Lost In Space... 



-Mike "is that a car tire?  "

[R J]

We had a little b/w Philco my step-dad picked up at a pawn shop.
Changed channels with a pair of vise grips.
We had 3 stations.

2 of them we could get on 1 antennae and the other channel on the other one.  We had to unwire one and wire up the other to do this.

2 of the stations were in town here, the other one was 50 miles North of us in Ames.

I just sold the old Philco radio my step-dad bought new in 1947.   It still played after all these years and some guy in New Mexico, that had more $$$$$ than brains wanted it.   So, he brought cash and a 2 seat van after it.   Now I have more room in my back garage......

Now I need to remove 16 boxes of mom's stuff from her apt. when she died in 92, and also her old TV.    It still brings in channels 2 through 13.... on a rabbit ears.

[Challenger]

I remember our old Philco with a rubber band wrapped from the VHF to the UHF tuner knobs to keep the station from drifting, And the horizontal hold knob rubbed smooth from trying to keep the picture from rolling, Still great childhood memories. 

[Gary]

I got the old black and white console type with four legs, when the folks got the new color model. I removed the legs, put that beast on top of my clothes dresser, ran an extension cord around to my bedside that had an on/off switch. I got yer remote covered, uptown I tell ya!