Fogey Business (Entertainment 1)
More dwelling in the past:
We lived next door to a family of teachers. Both the dad and mom of that family were public school teachers. They weren't rich, therefore (they wouldn't be living in our neighborhood if they were rich, or even upper middle class,) but they did all right. Like my parents, they were a two-income family when that wasn't very common.
Mr. Powell (the neighbor man) was a classical music aficionado. He and my Dad swapped stories about the new "hi-fi" (high fidelity) idea and the equipment that went with it. One day, he invited us over to see his latest gimmick. He had built into his wall two large speakers. Two! He was getting ready for a new technology in music recordings - stereo! The first day we saw his system, he showed us his stereo amplifier. It was a monster machine, hidden in the bedroom adjacent to the living room, because it hummed like crazy and produced lots of heat. It had a golden glow from the tubes on the chassis. He had it connected to a record player he called, for some reason, a "turntable." It had, we were told, not a "needle" to set into the records' grooves, but a diamond stylus. A diamond!
He only had the one stereo record. There were hardly any stereo recordings available, and almost all of them around then were "demonstration" records ... compilations of sonic adventures like the wind blowing by, race cars going through your living room, a marching band parading past, a conversation between two people, and so on. And, of course, music. Mostly big bands and jazz, with strikingly clear (and completely unatural sounding) channel separation to show off the new technology. But his favorite was the classical music ... only a few selections, of course, but still.
Later, he and my Dad got together for the first stereo radio broadcast in our area. No one had stereo radio receivers yet, but monophonic FM had been around for a few years, with its better clarity and static-free sound. So the first stereo broadcasts were done with one channel on FM and one channel on AM; the listener would turn on both radios, tuned to the appropriate stations, and place one on each side of the room. Again, most of the music broadcast this way was classical, jazz, or big band. I was interested in hearing rock-and-roll in this format, but the two of them insisted that there would be no reason to listen to rock-and-roll in stereo, and no market for it.
My Dad got the bug, of course. He sent for and built, over the course of many months, a "Heath Kit" stereo tape recorder. Heath kits were well-engineered electronics equipment sold as kits ... a case, all the hardware, and all the electronics componenets along with intructions on how to assemble it yourself. Dad and I learned to solder correctly, and began the assembly. The first task was to sort out all the tiny (by those days' tube-radio standards) components. The instructions included keys for decyphering the colored coding on resistors and capacitors, because the instructions called for these by rating (ohms, farads, etc.), not by color. Dad had dozens of old egg cartons spread out on our ping-pong table in the basement, and labeled with the various ratings of the components. We sorted them out into these little wells both to prepare for the assembly, as well as to verify that we had all the necessary parts.
This step alone took weeks. After we were done, but before the assembly got underway, my sister's dog got up onto the table and spilled the contents all over the floor, scrambling all the pieces back into the chaos in which they had arrived. After appropriate ranting, we started again the patient process of sorting and counting.
This was a four-track reel-to-reel tape recorder - stereo ... left and right going one way, then left and right going back the other way (no such thing as cassettes then, nor even the clunky infinite-loop 8-track tapes. All that came much later.) The tracks were interlaced like you might interlace the fingers of your hands: left forward, right reverse, right forward, left reverse; the alignment of the recording and playback heads was critical, of course. You could always hear a tiny little bit of "cross-talk" of the channels going the other way through the playback head. This was actually a pretty great device, but it suffered from all the ills of any tape machine (slipping clutches, snapping tapes, etc.), plus all the ills of "early adopter" equipment. Not to mention the do-it-yourself limitations.
When we had it all assembled (I don't want to imply here that I helped very much ... this was my Dad's project ... I just liked to watch and ask), it didn't work, of course. Heath had a deal where you could send in the assembled kit to be "corrected" by their technicians, but this so-called portable recorder weighed probably thirty pounds, including the two speakers that were built into the case, speakers which could be removed to increase separation. So, rather than pay the cost of shipping two ways, the cost of repair (open-ended), and the impatient wait for Heath to fix it, Dad had one of his buddies from his work place, who was an electronics hobbyist (HAM radio) look at it for him. He fixed a couple of cold solders, and it worked fine. The chassis was not a printed-circuit board (printed circuits were brand-new, super-high-tech then, used by IBM and the like in computers, whatever they were), but a plastic "bread-board", screen printed with the necessary positions of the components. Everything was soldered in place and wired by hand.
We used that recorder for several years to send tapes to my sister when she and her husband lived in the Netherlands after they were first married. Dad liked to fiddle around with the recordings, switching channels back and forth, transcribing recorded music (early ripping!) from records, and goofing around with the tape speeds. This machine used the 1/4" wide tape that then seemed narrow, but today seems really wide ... if you know what 8mm home movie film looks like, it was about that wide.
Later we got a second, professionally manufactured, Ampex recorder. You could scrape away the emulsion from the tape to create a little transparent window toward the end of the tape. the machine had a tiny light and photo-electric sensors for ending the tape when it detected one of those windows, so the loose end of the tape wouldn't beat itself to a frazz against the machine, and also a sensor to detect a second window, if there was one, to reverse the tape and play the other way. This way, a tape could be set up to play over and over again, theoretically endlessly. In one direction, each tape could carry over an hour of sound at high speed (hi-fi), or double that for lo-fi. So, you could listen to two hours of hi-fi music or as much as four hours of lo-fi music on one tape, before it repeated. A big advance over records, which had one or two songs on them per side (for the then-standard 78 rpm's or the newer 45's), or even LP's (long-playing records at 33-1/3 rpm) which had twenty or thirty minutes of music per side, and had to be turned over manually.
Eventually, our neighbor installed separate woofers and tweeters and filters and cross-overs and so on and basically made swiss cheese of his living-room wall. It always looked like hell, and didn't even sound that great to me. mostly, he tried to impress by playing it really loud. There's still a lot of that today.
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I remember distincly when Dad brought the first TV into our house. Others in the neighborhood had them, but they weren't common (this was long before the tape-recorder thing mentioned above.) Our first TV we actually kept for many, many years. It was the size of a small refrigerator with a screen about the size of a paper-back book.
It was black-and-white only, of course. At first, we received only one station or "channel." We had only rabbit-ears ... a kind of little antenna that sat on top of the set to pick up local broadcats. Although TV is FM, and supposedly free from static and so on, the signals were weak and notrotiously scrambled. We spent a great deal of time jiggling the rabbit-ears around, adjusting the horizontal and vertical hold controls, and "fine tuning" the station with the "fine tuning" knob. If successful, all these tweaks resulted in a grainy, low-definition grey-on-grey image of some local guy reading the news. Or boxing, which my Dad loved, for reasons which remain unclear to me. Or professional wrestling (Gorgeous George, etc. ... not that much different from WWF today.) Or puppet shows. Or revival-tent fundamentalists. Or sappy sentimantal "reality" shows like "Queen for a Day." Actually not all that different from network programming now.
When color TV started to get popular, practically no one could afford such a set in our neighborhood, plus neither of the local channels broadcast in color, so if you wanted a color set, you also had to have a roof-top antenna. And I'm not talking a cute little sattelite dish, either. The antennas required to pick up Denver from Colorado Springs were honking big structures with many arms and cross-struts on a tall steel mast with guys wires and tensioning turnbuckles. Perfect targets for lightning strikes, they all had to be equipped with lightning rods, or you could expect to burn down your house. And, like rabbit ears, these large outsoor antennas, too, had to be tweaked ... aimed and re-aimed contantly for best reception. So the best installations had motorized rotation systems which could be controlled from inside while you watched the set to see when the good picture was obtained. The cheap ones required the dad to go outside while mom or the kids yelled instructions at him.
In any case, all together, a good color TV and a decent antenna cost thousands of dollars when a top-quality car was still only a thousand or a little more. The Powells had one, of course, and another neighbor down the street had one. All the kids in the neighborhood had an open invitation to go down there each Sunday night to see "Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color." I remember the picture being not much better than our black and white set, with only a hint of color, or garishly colored, with the reds especially bad, smearing clear across the screen. Loved it.
One day, Dad brought home a clear plastic sheet that was tinted blue toward one edge and pinkish brown to the other edge. The idea was that you trimmed this sheet to fit over your TV tube, with the blue strip at the top and the brown strip at the bottom. The intention was that, at least when outdoors scenes were shown, the sky would be blue and the ground would be brown. Sort of early colorizing.
Problem being, of course, that most things were not shot outdoors. Lucy Ricardo had blue hair rather than red, and Ricky always had what looked like five-o'clock shadow. Not great.
Dad also brought home a toy that consisted of diffraction gratings and wavy lines printed on clear acetate. If you held them up to the TV and moved them around, the cathode ray beam scanning interval would cause them to appear to be in motion ... early op art.
Programming started in late afternoon, and ended at bedtime ... ten o'clock maybe ... with the Star-Spangled-Banner. Earlier in the day, the stations broadcast "Test Patterns" - a fixed image of a target with various lines and text along with a photograph in the middle ... I mostly remember an Indian chief. Eventually, Arthur Godfrey and Art Linkletter discovered housewives, and that opened the floodgates of daytime TV. Soap operas, game shows, and talk shows prevailed. Again, not much different from today.
One form of show which was prominent on all the networks then was the variety show. These were usually built around a single personality - usually a singer, and included singing, dancing, comedy sketches, and talk segments like letters from the viewers or reminiscences. Red Skelton, Perry Como, Red Buttons, Dinah Shore, and so-on were among the mainstays of the network schedule. There's nothing quite like that today, although I think shows like American Idol sort of fit that niche.
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Movies and more in Entertainment 2.
posted by Mique @ 9:22 PM
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