Interestingly enough, seems that those that use the 7" sets regularly choose Motorola as their "daily driver".

At the moment, I have 2 working, an Admiral 19A11SN, and a Motorola VT-71. The Admiral has such a razor sharp clear picture, the Motorola isn't quite as crisp but I seem to gravitate to the Motorola. The Admiral's picture is so sharp that it might as well be a more modern transistor BW set, the Motorola....you watch it and it reminds you that it's still an old television :)

There hasn't been too much "Feel Good" news around here lately.
The only good news is the young girl, that was stabbed multiple times by her "friends", is home and recovering nicely. :thmbsp:
The bad news is three shootings, with one fatality, overnight. :sigh:
Fox6 news, "Fair and Balanced". :boring:
During the day, I'll turn on "Touch TV" for a while. They show the important historical facts of the day and old newsreels, plus local weather and news briefs. It's a digital sub of the CBS channel.

I like 'em too. Not sure what the fascination is, but I've always had to buy them when they show up :scratch2:...

Charles

For the most part, they have to be color, although I have a few B/W sets.
I have to take inventory, as I have four Zenith 9" cube sets, one badged Heathkit.
Small, Sears, Goldstar-built sets. Funai-built 9" Magnavox undercabinet set.
Everyone grumbles about Funai sets, but their small screen TV only models are really reliable. The VCR combos, not so. :thumbsdn:

Although I am too young to have witnessed this first hand it is one of the stories I tell people when showing them my collection. Bob- I may print quotes like this out someday to display for people to get an idea of how television used to bring people together instead of driving people apart as it does today.

yes and we dressed up to go to the doctor and about everywhere.
now as long as my clothes are clean i do not care i am not dressing up.

btw remember all the nurses had white clothes and a white cap on.

Yeah, & they about ALL wore heels, & I think a lot of 'em musta worn "Taps", to, 'cause they 'd go "Clack...Clack...Clack...Clack.." as they walked down the hall. My wife has one of them little "Go To Hell" caps, but I've been w/her since 2007, & I've NEVER seen it. About all of 'em, doctors, nurses, techs, the whole kit & caboodle wear scrubs, & sneakers, or Crocs, as my wife does. And I don't think any of 'em wear the caps, except ones fresh out of nursing school. But she says think about it-those starched white uniforms were UNCOMFORTABLE, the 1st patient you see will bleed or puke on you, so there goes the pretty white business right out the window, I GUESS somebody still makes the "Dress Whites", but hardly anyone wears them.

Or, they have a tiny living room, like I do. If I moved my couch away from the wall to have a walking path behind it, the dimensions would about match that picture. To me, though, that would be the right viewing distance for a 65-inch 1080P screen. :)

They have no coffee table in their little room (and neither do I). I suppose, if you used a 7-inch TV as your living-room set, you could probably only afford a small room anyway.

Yes there are also several news hours throughout the day on the locals here too. Fortunately, only so much bad or could-care-less news happens in the Harrisburg-York-Lancaster market, so it seems pretty lame. Only the weather is truly unpredictable

Now for the Philly channels, well that's a different story and the car dealers must shout (especially the NJ dealers, where its even cheaper) how they are simply DESPARATELY INSANE to get rid of the overstock and will NOT LET YOU OUT OF THEIR STORE until a deal is to your liking.

And now for something completely different....

I got used to a 7-inch set when I was a teenager and took my Sony TV-720 "upstate" to the cabin in the late 70s so i wouldn't miss SNL and SCTV.
There was only 12 volts DC and two channels available.

My father-in-law recalls a very popular neighbor in the late '49 hosted "friday night fights" parties similar to Bob's description.
i'll keep working on him to remember if it was a Moto VT71 or RCA 621TS..=)
Fortunately, that town was not limited to the one channel intended to cover the area, but could get all three Philly stations as well.

But even though they wore nice clothes, seems that generation didn't shower real often. "BO". "PU". I'd hate to be time travel teleported back to that era...

About 20 years ago I used to work for Philips in New York. We'd have expatriates from Europe come work here for a year or more, at first they tended to be stinky. But most cleaned up their act, though one, it seemed the smell could peel the paint off the walls... :thumbsdn:

Don't think the local news at the New York City TV stations (the ones that are named for their networks, WABC, WNBC, WCBS) is any better. "If it bleeds, it leads" Also fires and murders and rapes. The only quality news is found during the national and world news shows.

That's EXACTLY what I think of every time I see Jimmy Roberts on the Lawrence Welk show. I often wonder how many layers of bear grease he's got on his head.

Every time I see him, I wanna say TAKE A BATH WILL YOU? :no:

One of my grandpa's friends was a fellow by the name of Monty Cutler. I have no idea how often Monty bathed, but I'm sure he absolutely never used a deodorant in his whole life. Monty was married--twice--so apparently pheromones were still effective with even some American girls back then. But there was also the oft-repeated story about one lady who actually confronted Monty about his odiferousness: he told her "it's a manly smell and the ladies like it." So there.

There were a few customers at my former work placement I would have liked to have sent through a car wash, without a car.

Sometimes you have to do without in order to appreciate what most of us take for granted. I learned this about many things in life, but the topic is small screen TV sets. The power goes out a lot where I live for whatever reason. So I always have kept a small TV around that I could run on a power inverter from my truck's battery.

For years I had a 13" black and white which at the young age of 45 is not crazy small. That's all that me and my grandmother ever had when I was growing up and we didn't even think twice about it. Dad had the monolithic 25" remote controlled, color floor model in the basement, but we were happy with what we had.

Anyway, I donated the 13" a while back and found an 80s Panasonic AM-FM-TV portable that ran on D cells or AC line. It has like maybe a 4" black and white tube. Panasonic really had it going on with quality and durability back in the early to mid 80s. Everything I ever find is bullet proof. So, twice now the power has gone out and I lit the oil lamps and set the little tv on the coffee table and was perfectly content. It sure beat sitting there in the dark! The inverter runs the tv and either the DirecTv or free TV box for hours before the low voltage alarm sounds and I go crank the truck and recharge the battery.

Really I could easily run my bedroom 19" PANASONIC that plays around the clock many days without flaw. It would just run the battery down a lot quicker. It's another 80s set. I don't have the stuff for nostalgia; I just have it to use. Just regular stuff to me and works and lasts better than the crap their pushing these days.

That was 'specially true when they went to church. The worst stinkys had to sit in their own Pew.

I always heard that saying was related to passing gas.
Still funny, just the same. :D

My residence seems to be on the end of the line, from the power plant, as it seems that we have more power failures, than most.
I keep a small "Garden Tractor" battery in an old Igloo cooler. When the power goes out, we have no phone, cable or internet. I use a 200 watt H-F inverter, connected to the battery, operating my RCA "prison vision" and a 13 watt CFL in a desk lamp. A total of 68 watts.
The set has a built-in ATSC board an can receive Milwaukee channels, 41 miles away.
The longest, the power was out, was about 5 hours.

Thats what I'm talking about, All of my 'antiques' As my freinds say are just the only thing that I have found that was cheep enuf/Good enuf for me. There all every day use stuff. IN fact the only thing I own that was made AFTER I was born is my cell phone and my computer. Everything else is pre-1993 and used everyday...

I think the oldest thing I own would be a toss up between my late 40's tostmaster toaster and my late 40's kirby vacuum cleaner.

That gets harder and harder to accomplish as the years roll on :no:

Most of my stuff is for regular use *and* nostalgia. Sure I have stuff from before I was born, but was still commonly used when I was a kid, and those things are still perfectly suitable for use today as almost all technical advances since then have been completely unnecessary. None of those I would hang around with back then had the latest of everything.

WOW! We should start a thread on age and its effect on what one sees as an "antique" or simply common household goods. People I think tend to look with nostalgia at things from their childhood and back as the good stuff; the cool stuff; the better built stuff. I wonder how much of that is true.

Certainly products made in America were once build with pride, quality, and craftsmanship, along with good engineering aimed at making a product that is serviceable and if maintained would last a long time. I would say that this concept runs from anytime back in our history until the start of its downfall somewhere in the mid 1970s. It's a linear decline from there on and the worst part is that we started engineering products toward planned obsolescence and limited lifespan without serviceability.

It's just interesting that it appears that that Coshi is about 21 years old. Many things from just before he was born and throughout his childhood up to today to be honest are not of the superior quality that some of us decades older look back to. This is especially true with electronics and automobiles. TVs, stereos, VCRs, DVDs etc, have been the same Chinese made plastic crap since the 80s for the most part. Off course someone younger may say compared to what as they have never known or seen anything different. It's probably easier for them to see the quality changes of automobiles as there are more of them to see on the road or at shows, but vintage electronics are not readily available and cheap like they were when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s.

Thrift stores and flea markets were always full of lots of old radios. Aging 50s and 60s TVs were everywhere for a song if not for free. That's the thing; that was junk then! LOL!! I used to get these "roundie" color sets when I was taking electronics in high school and do a little repair work with my limited skills; watch them till they gave trouble and part them out as I had another waiting to take it's place. I had a basement full of those sets and parts along with a slew of 50s black and white sets. Heck, we had a Predicta in our school electronics lab! Just another old donation set for us to destroy.

So, will some young man in 2034 look back at the superior quality and nostalgia of a 2014 LG flat screen TV, or perhaps an I phone. Maybe he will use a Dell PC and a dial up modem! Will he be restoring his 2012 Hyundai Elantra. Hopefully he will have a little money and at least be able to go for the neo-retro muscle cars like Dodge Challenger or a Camaro. Maybe he can just find one of those Spencer Gifts Tesla globes to keep the electronics history interesting, or maybe a WalMart coffee percolator! LOL

Yea I know the new things I had when growing up where plastic Chinese junk, Thats why it all ended up being thrown out. It just happens that I learned that most things made before 1970-80 was the most reliable and the cheapest. Hell I whent through 3 refrigerators in 3 years, Then I said screw this and when to the junk shop and bought a pale green 1960's ish Frigidaire! its been with us for years since.

And this does seem to be derailing... (Sorry)

The kids sat on your knee. ....or stood respectfully at the back.

http://pix.avaxnews.com/avaxnews/f7/...f7_medium.jpeghttps://c2.staticflickr.com/4/3099/3...1bbbc709_z.jpg

..but not everyone got a good view!

http://media.wbur.org/wordpress/16/f...25-592x450.jpg

More..

https://playingintheworldgame.files....6/05813846.jpg
http://timelifeblog.files.wordpress....1/00706183.jpg

I really enjoyed reading this post! - and the pics too. I think it's like with early radio. You tweak an old three-dialer and then get a flat tinny sound out of the horn. You have to realize that with something so new and amazing, it was all a total thrill. Same with all the issues of TV when it first appeared. I heard many people would turn their sets on and just look at the test pattern in amazement. In Queens, NY around 1948, my father said a neighbor bought a projection set (guess he had a few bucks!) and Tuesday night was a big event for the him and the neighbors to go over and watch the Texaco Star Theater. My father remembered being facinated by it.
Joe

I dunno-I kinda got the same feeling when I got MY 1st 3-dialer about 10, 15 yrs ago... I thought it was pretty amazing. And by then, I had several R-3XXs, a JRC NRD-535D, buncha other stuff. My dad said he saw his 1st TV when he was in the Army in 1949-50 or so. This one couple who were friends w/my parents & another couple would all gather in Stan & Elaine's TINY apt, pile up on the bed & stare at this little box..I think the apt basically had 2 or maybe 3 rooms, a bath, kitchen, bedroom/living room & that was it.

I have the same model of GE fan in the last picture. It was my grandfathers shop fan, and it likely would not exist today if I had not saved it when my mom and aunts were cleaning out grandmas house.

The Philco TV my grandparents had back in 1951 would be reasonably watchable compared to a 7" screen.
http://www.wa2ise.com/radios/familyalbum-phtv.jpg
Their living room was about 12 by 14 feet, and had a couch and an easy chair.

A bit late for this, but now I recall from 40 years ago back in college a foreign student in our undergraduate English class mentioned to one of our hippie looking classmates (in raggedy jeans and tattered Tshirt saying "The Grand Wazoo") "You look like a bum.". I pointed out to him that our classmate may look raggedy, but his clothes are freshly laundered and he showered this morning as well. :yes: Bums aren't like that... :no: