Black and White Television

Remember the Peacock?

I don't know how many of you folks out there remember when all we had were black and white televisions to watch. While I did grow up with relatives having color TVs, and remember going over to my uncle's house to watch the weird colors on his television, we didn't get one ourselves. As I recall, everyone had red skin on my uncle's TV. However, even though the colors were off, we still found it fascinating watching football games in RCA Color. I remember being curios to think about what the real colors looked like live. We would make educated guesses based on what we knew something actually looked like, and then comparing the tint of that color to some other object being displayed on the television at the time and determining that that was the real color.

I'm not sure why it took our family so long to get a color television, (maybe it was the cost of the early TV sets, maybe because the early color television were viewed as not being a very good quality, maybe it was viewed by my Dad as a waste of time watching TV altogether - and he was mostly right) but I had grown up on black and white TV until my twenties. Then, watching all the old shows in color was like watching them for the first time.

I also remember how often these television with tubes in them would break down. It seemed that every couple of years we had to call in the TV repairman to fix our black and white set. Sometimes the repairman would have to take our TV back to his shop to fix it on the bench. During some of those repair times, the guy would loan our family a TV to watch while he fixed ours. I remember thinking that the loaner TV was actually better than the one we owned. Wow, that was interesting period of time. Now, most of the time, when our television breaks, we throw it away and buy a new one. Times certainly have changed.