“It's HOWDY DOODY time!"

I was going to tell you how I hurt my head.

It started when we got a television set.
We didn’t get a brand-new TV (we almost never got brand-new things because they were too expensive).
We got a used black-and-white TV with a tiny screen. It looked sort of like this:

We were so excited when Dad brought that TV home!

It came with a tall metal antenna. That was how the TV signal was transmitted. Most people put their antennas on the top of their houses but we couldn’t do that. Remember how steep the hill was? TV signals couldn’t go through the hills and our roof was below the hills on both sides of the valley. So Dad had to put the antenna up on a tree at the top of the path that came down to our house and run a wire from it down to the house.


The antenna had to be facing exactly right to get a TV signal coming down the valley between the hills. So he had to climb up and turn it and yell down to us and we had to look at the TV screen and yell back.
“How is it now?”
“Nothing but snow”
So he'd turn it a little more:
“How about now?”
“There’s a fuzzy picture with a lot of snow”
He'd twist it a little bit more:
“Now how is it?
“Hey, there’s Bugs Bunny!”

What's up, Doc?

We could have said, "Dad's what's up, up in the tree turning the antenna."

When I say "Snow" that's what you saw on the screen when the signal didn’t come in clearly. It looked like white flakes of fuzzy snow vibrating all over the screen. Most of the time our signal didn’t come in very clearly, but you could make out the picture.

There wasn’t a lot on TV when I was nine. There weren't shows all the time either. The TV stations signed off at night with the national anthem and then they shut off. When the station was off, the screen was blank even if you turned on the TV.

When I was nine, you didn’t have a remote to change the stations - just the knobs to turn. Actually that didn’t matter too much to us. We could usually only get one station anyway, and if it was raining hard or if the wind blew the antenna a little, then we couldn’t even get that one.

My little brother watched a local educational show called “Romper Room”. It was a live show and once he got to be on it. We drove down to the TV station with Joe B. wearing his best clothes. It was like a little preschool, only with giant TV cameras, lots of big wires all over the floor, and really bright lights on the kids. I was a little bit jealous that Joe B. got to be on TV. Even though he was really excited about being on TV, once he was there he got really shy. I think he wouldn't even say his name. He might remember more about this than I do!

Lots of shows had live audiences like that. The Howdy Doody show called their audience “The Peanut Gallery”. Buffalo Bob would call out "Say, what time is it?" And all the kids would jump up and down and yell "It's Howdy-Doody Time!"

Howdy Doody was a marionette, and so were some of the other characters: Phineas T. Bluster, Dilly Dally, and a cow whose name I don’t remember. It wasn’t like a puppet show because there were real people on it – Buffalo Bob and Clarabell the clown and my favorite , Princess Summerfall Winterspring. Great names, weren’t they? We didn’t watch this show every week because it came on Saturday morning and often we were out doing things then.

We did watch one evening show pretty often: The Mickey Mouse Club. We had to be all ready for bed before we could watch TV, so we were pretty motivated to get cleaned up and in our pajamas early.

The Mickey Mouse Club was where we saw the Davy Crockett episodes with the famous “Daaavy, Daaavy Crocket, King of the Wild Frontier” song. Joe B. and I sang that song all the time, and he even had a raccoonskin cap with a striped tail hanging down the back, just like Davy Crockett’s cap. I think he had the whole outfit with the fringe on the sleeves of the jacket and a rifle to go with it.

Even if we didn’t watch TV very often, the shows we did watch made a big impression on us.
And that’s why I hurt my head.
I’ll tell you about that the next time.