The miracle of reliable TV service

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Seventy years ago, Northeastern Pennsylvania experienced a miracle.

Well, sort of! But it seemed like a real one at the time.

For decades, the papers and magazines had been running articles about the new entertainment medium of television. In the post-World War II years, here as well as all over America, families were clustering around a big box with a little black-and-white moving picture that kept flipping and fading, and they were probably wondering if this TV thingamajig would ever deliver on its promise of a new kind of in-home entertainment.

By 1954, though, the miraculous was at last showing up here in Northeastern Pennsylvania – in full force, thanks to the recent appearance of local stations. WBRE-TV (NBC) had come online a year and a half earlier as our first regional television outlet.

Over the next year, that station was joined by others representing CBS (WGBI) and ABC (WILK and WARM), plus an occasional independent outlet.

With the major networks now in the region, a full slate of programming was finally at hand – and it was dependable.

Whether you opted for the zany comedy of “I Love Lucy,” the crime thrills and chills of “Dragnet” or the rockem-sockem of the Friday night fights, you no longer had to worry about losing a grainy picture struggling in from Philly or Harrisburg.

You could also go down to the corner store and buy a little magazine called “TV Guide,” which gave you colorful stories and photos about the shows and their stars.

Television had been long in the pipeline. As early as the 1920s scientists had succeeded in transmitting still pictures from one lab room to another. But the Great Depression of the 1930s followed by World War II slowed progress on consumer goods.

By the late 1940s, with the war over and the economy growing, larger cities had developed TV stations, some affiliated with national media networks as they moved beyond radio.

Cable systems also arose, picking up and rebroadcasting network signals dependably for a monthly fee. Taverns were quick to sign up for this service, seeing it as a way to build trade by guaranteeing that the picture would not conk out halfway through the welterweight championship fight.

But most people with in-home TV sets relied on big roof antennas designed to pull in a picture (however shaky and unreliable) from afar. That’s why an array of local channels with their dependable tech was a revelation. Once your antenna was up, except for an occasional tube failure inside the set (time to call the repairman), you were now good to go.

Those early television sets, by the way, were not cheap. Ads show them costing upwards of $200 – sometimes WAY upwards – in an era when a couple of thousand bucks a year was considered a princely salary.

Another downside: screens were small and came in black-and-white only. A 21-inch tube was something to dream about, and many viewers settled for making do with less than that. Color would soon begin to creep in, but for the moment planning for a new (and more costly) color-compatible set was not on a lot of people’s radar.

Variety? No one seriously questioned having to put up with scanty choice of programming in 1954. If you got your Ed Sullivan and your nightly news and your Saturday afternoon baseball and the kids sprawled on the floor were kept busy with a puppet show, everybody was happy.

And wasn’t that pretty much a miracle?

Tom Mooney is a Times Leader history and genealogy writer. Reach him at [email protected].