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Seasonal Question

Charles Lent said:
Ok, I just joined so I don't know my way around here very well, but I'd like to add this -

I don't remember listening to much on the radio except for "The Lone Ranger", but do any of you remember early television?

Like -

Beanie and Cecil?

Kookla, Fran, and Ollie?

Howdy Doody, Clarabell, and Buffalo Bob?

Captain Video?

All four if these kids shows were on New York TV in the early 1950's. I can remember watching them on a 3 1/2" TV screen with a magnifying glass attached to the front of the screen to "kind of" make the screen seem bigger. The TV set was made by Pilot Radio and Television. We lived 40 miles North of NY so the pictures on this tiny TV was more snow (lack of adequate signal) than picture, but my sister and I would watch as long as we could at least see the shapes of people through the snow.

Charley
Click to expand...

I remember Howdy Doody... that was the first TV show I ever saw... it was on a field trip from my school down to the local storekeepers house and I was in the fifth grade(1954)... a 3 room school in a country community... we had 3 in the fifth grade, 4 in the 4th grade, 6 in 3rd... all in my class room. First, second and kindergarden were in another room and 6th, 7th and 8th in another... high school was bused to town.
 
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Yea, she got my attention too. But that was years later and our TV was much bigger by then so you could easily see what was on.


For me, the first time that I watched Beanie and Cecil I could hear them, but the signal was so bad that the images were only faint moving lines.
A few weeks later my father got us a better antenna and then we could actually see what we were watching, but on a 3" TV my sister and I were almost butting heads to see the whole screen. Beanie wore a tight fitting cap with propellers on the top. It wasn't long after I began watching the show that these Beanie hats with the propellers began appearing in the stores and then on many of the kids. My sister and I had them.

Kookla, Fran, and Ollie was a puppet show. Kookla was a puppet with a high voice that had a round bulb kind of nose and old man's type bald head with hair just around the sides and back. Fran was a young woman who was in front of the puppet stage and talked with the puppets. Ollie was supposed to be a dragon puppet, but he looked to me more like an alligator with a fuzzy hairdo. He had a big alligator mouth, but with only 2 teeth together in the front top of his mouth.

Howdy Doodie was the first show that we saw when my father first brought the 3" TV home.

I can remember watching Captain Video after school. He had kind of a space ship cockpit set behind him.

A few years later Roy Rogers and Hopalong Cassidy seems to have replaced these early shows, or I just watched them instead of those "kiddy" shows. The Mickey Mouse Club began at about the same time as Hopalong and Roy were on, at least in my cloudy 70+ year old memory.

Charley
 
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My first encounter of actually seeing a TV. We were visiting friends in Portland, Ore. We had heard about this thing called a TV, but had never seen on. The only one our friends knew of in Portland, which they read about in the paper, was in a tavern. So we went to the tavern, the kids could not go in so we stood outside and looked in the window. We were not the only ones, there was quite a crowd wondering by trying to get a look at this new invention.
 
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