Television tales through the years

I recently had issues with my cable provider – again. The automated voice assistant kept wanting me to deal with it instead of getting a real person. I used to have to act very indignant, angry and even utter a few choice words to get its attention and be turned over to a live human assistant. Lately, this hasn't worked anymore, and being a confirmed Luddite, I have been rendered helpless. So now I've tried hanging up over and over, and this has worked so far, even though my blood pressure has risen dangerously high.

My children, and most of those millennials and younger, have other services for their TV viewing which demand that one be computer savvy. If I visit their homes, I would like to peruse the hundreds of movies they have access to, but usually I am diverted by the activities of the rug rats we're babysitting.

It is remarkable, however, the amount of channels we have access to these days. Long ago, we would have been like a kid in a candy store! Just speak into the voice-activated remote control and hundreds, if not thousands, of movies are available. But a lot of them have to be rented or a network must be subscribed to. They tempt us with the first two episodes in a series for free, and then force us to pay to continue watching the rest. Subscription fatigue seems to be a new medical condition, and there are even services to rid oneself of them.

Television choices in 1950s Milton offered a paltry menu. We had about three channels, with WBOC in Salisbury, Md., being the most predictable for viewing. There was WBAL from Baltimore. Its logo pictured the famous scrubbed white steps of that city's row homes. There was a Philadelphia station that was hard to get with our antenna, and Channel 12 (PBS) from Wilmington or Philadelphia, which proved equally unreliable.

My father had installed a tall metal tower on the north side of our home and had the antenna affixed to the very top of it, higher than the house. The tower was anchored to an almost room-sized block of poured concrete that was dug into the ground. I never realized this until a few years ago when we had a major plumbing problem, and the slab was dug up and then reburied. I wish Jeff had kept the photo he took of this sight, because it was unbelievable!

We had a box sitting on top of the TV with a lever you pushed up and down to turn the antenna to better receive the far-away signals. The stations sometimes faded in and out. The Walker family across the street sometimes heard my father talking on his King Cole car radio through their TV set!

I remember the weather girl of long ago, Nancy Pigman. The advertisers were often Benjamin's Department Store in Salisbury or Koontz Dairy, provider to "the carriage trade," with a logo of a woman pushing a baby carriage. TV at our cottage on Rodney Street in Dewey Beach was even more limited due to a smaller antenna. I was very proud as a teenager that I babysat for Bozo the Clown, who had a children's show on the Baltimore station.

I had erected a babysitting sign in our front yard facing traffic on the popular marina street. In my sloppy handwriting, I wrote "Need a Babysitter? Inquire Within." The adults laughed, but I got lots of business from "the carriage trade." They were summer visitors who had boats docked at the marina right down the street from our cottage. I might as well make some nighttime money, since the television screen was usually filled with white snowy static.

"I Love Lucy" and "The Jack LaLanne Show" exercise sessions were the most reliable in the morning, along with soap operas in the afternoon such as "The Edge of Night" and "As the World Turns." We watched these when we weren't down on the beach at Olive Avenue in Rehoboth.

"Sing Along with Mitch" and "The Lawrence Welk Show" entertained my grandmother and her blue-haired set in the evening. My father would never spring for color TV or cable. I tried to fool myself that a black-and-white screen was more intellectual as I watched "The Anthology of Guy de Maupassant" short stories on PBS. I'm shocked that my mother didn't protest and buy her own color TV, as she usually got whatever she wanted.

Meanwhile, there was our trusty TV repairman, Ed Kuczawa, who made house calls. Once, when my TV broke down in my apartment in the Moore building on Rehoboth Avenue, he even came there and parked out front in the middle of summer! I had purchased the cheapest TV, housed in a white plastic case. Later that day, he returned with a bigger and better TV in a walnut compartment, sent by my mother. She wanted to keep me happy and entertained during my short school teaching career, I suppose.

When my father passed away in 1970, she purchased a color TV and cable service for her den. No more picture tubes, and the local TV repairman became a thing of the past, like blacksmiths. Back about 20 years ago, Jeff and I bought an early-model flat-screen TV and paid extra for a repair warranty. A nasty Fourth of July thunderstorm produced a lightning strike near our home that burnt out our TV. Mimicking Hannibal Lecter in "Silence of the Lambs," we said, "Send that thing back to Baltimore," where the repair center was located. It took three months for them to fix it and send it back.

Now you can just go and buy another one at Walmart.