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Though I wasn't around then, I had many friends early in my TV hobby days who were. I grew up in Los Angeles, and amazingly, most people I know who were around during WWII recall knowing at least one person or business with a TV set during the war. However, I don't recall ANY of those people saying that they had actually watched a program on TV. The clearest account is that of a friend who was a pre-teen during WWII. His Mom worked temporarily as a cook for a millionaire family in the Bel Air district of Los Angeles. In the basement of that house was a mirror-lid TV, and he recalls seeing it demonstrated once by the homeowner. His impression of the TV set was that it was a toy, and was just "something that a millionaire would have to talk about on the golf course".
Another friend who was an adult during the War told me that he watched an afternoon football game at a bar in Hollywood within days of Pearl Harbor, and that the audience was so fascinated with the television set (possibly a DuMont table model, from his description,) that nobody even paid attention to who was playing the game.
Charles
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Collecting & restoring TVs in Los Angeles since age 10
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