Zenith 19" BW - 1977 found

[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by AlanInSitges

My grandparents, who lived way out in the boonies in the Great Smoky Mountain National Park, had one of these. Color hurt their eyes, according to them, so they stayed with B&W.

They had quite a memorable setup, at least to a 12-year-old who spent the summer out there. They lived in a valley, and had two different antennas on top of two different mountains, connected by 450-ohm open ladder line. One got the Chattanooga station, and the other was a huge yagi that picked up a couple of stations from Knoxville. I don't know for sure how far away the antennas were from the house but do remember going with my uncle in the jeep up to clear brush from the big one during one of my visits, and it must have been a mile or more.

Evidently at some point one of the antennas had been struck by lightning and ruined their old TV, so the antennas were connected to a lightning arrester next to the house, then to a matching transformer, then regular twin lead ran inside the house where it ended in two clothespins. You never, ever, ever, left those clothespins connected to the antenna terminals (grandma had a switch to make sure the kids didn't forget) unless you were watching the TV, and there was always discussion of the weather before doing so. I can remember a couple of times where phone calls were made up the valley - on a party line! - to ask if it looked like a storm was coming before the TV could be hooked up.

Good times.

I never knew color TV could "hurt" anyone's eyes until I read your post, although I am 65 years old and do remember when kids were told not to sit too close to the screen. I believe this must have started not long after the color television X-ray scare of the 1970s. It wouldn't have surprised me if, in those days, kids were also warned against watching TV with the contrast and/or brightness controls set too high.

My late mother's family lived in Dalton, Georgia, where they could get three channels (3, 9 and 12 at the time) from Chattanooga using just an indoor antenna, IIRC. The reception was excellent on their TV, an RCA (IIRC) 23" b&w console with power tuning.

I was surprised to read in your post that your grandparents could only receive one channel from Chattanooga and another from another city, using two antennas, unless it was in the late 1940s or very early 1950s, when most areas, if they had TV at all, could only get one or two channels. When the first TV station, WEWS-TV on channel 5, went on the air in Cleveland, in 1947, it was in fact the only TV station in all of northeastern Ohio until 1948, when channel 4, then WNBK-TV (for W N B Kcleveland; WNBC had already been assigned to the NBC TV affiliate, the network's flagship station in New York), signed on in the area. (Later, channel 4 was moved to channel 3, when the NBC affiliate in Detroit went on the air; the move was made to avoid co-channel interference with the Cleveland station, and vice-versa.)

Channel eight, then (as now) WJW-TV, signed on in 1949 and was a CBS affiliate from then until some 40 years later; the station then gave up its CBS TV affiliation and dumped it onto channel 19, a wrong-headed move if I ever saw one. The latter being a UHF station broadcasting at full allowable power (over three million watts ERP), it was all but unwatchable in much if not most of northern Ohio unless you had a good outdoor antenna, and even then many Cleveland suburbs (I lived in one then) did not receive the station, very well or at all. If I had lived at that time (mid-1980s) where I live now (an area about 30 miles from Cleveland and 40+ miles southwest of the city's TV stations' towers), I probably would not have been able to get channel 19 at all without a huge antenna, cable or satellite. Today, most everyone in this area has cable or satellite so TV reception problems are, for the most part, a thing of the past.