Man, I just picked up my second Panasonic 50 inch plasma, HD TV and it's great. Got me to thinking what we use to have. We got our first TV set about 1956. It was one of those wooden console sets with a small black and white screen. I think my father bought it from Sag Harbor Electronics, a store on upper Main Street nowadays occupied by a book shop. The store was run by two men, Jack Kraft and Walter Sterns. These guys also installed the rooftop antenna. There was no cable in those days, and the only channels you could get was channel 8, WHNC in New Haven, CT and WTIC channel 3 in Hartford which was a little snowy. The TV's of this era had tubes, and the TV repairmen would come to your house in a red van and fix the TV if it was only a tube replacement. Otherwise they took the guts of the TV to their shop on upper Main Street to repair. TV shows in this era such as Ed Sullivan, Sea Hunt, 77 Sunset Strip, etc, played on one of three national TV networks, ABC, CBS, NBC. By 1 am the TV stations in Connecticut would sign off the air and you would see the test pattern below. The transmitters themselves, located on some remote hilltop; ran 24 hours a day, but this was before remote control shutoff by the studio to the transmitter and this is the reason you would see the test pattern all night, cause there weren't no dudes at the transmitter site to shut it off at night!
In 1965 cablevision built a 350 foot tower off Brick Kiln Rd. and cable TV arrived in Sag Harbor. You would get 12 channels, from NY city and Ct. for $5.00 a month, a real bargain. Color TV arrived in the mid to late 60's and HBO launched it's first satellite in 1976 so you could receive it's movie channel for an extra 9.95 a month. From then on cable kept adding channels and increasing it's monthly rate to you have the services you do today. A footnote, in Feb 2009 all analog TV signals, the stuff we received from our rooftop antennas will cease to transmit and all broadcasting will be digital, freeing up the TV spectrum for other services! My kids say I'm full of shit, which I am, most of the time, and don't believe the story about 2 channels and black and white, of my youth, but anyone over 50 knows what I am talking about.
Man, this was how you adjusted the old rooftop antenna
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