Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis for July 04, 2018

…and no remote.

I only had 3 and 2 were UHF which were difficult to receive. (Kids ask you grandparents what UHF is, don’t just Google it.)

(insert clever comment here)

oh, the horror

Four channels when I was growing up, but two of them were both NBC affiliates.

I can think of four unless there was some unusual weather. All were UHF and thanks to digital I can only get one of those now. Thanks, Clinton.

In Adelaide, we had NO television until I was thirteen. We had to learn how to read.And I once horrified my nieces by pointing out that we didn’t know what pizza was.

And all the channels were in BLACK AND WHITE!! (the kids scream in horror and could never go to bed that night)

I didn’t know that I was in the lap of luxury back then. We had three VHF stations and three UHF stations.

Only had 3. Couldn’t receive UHF.

Then, one day, a small, unimportant-looking cement block building appeared on a vacant lot a few blocks from us, with a yagi antenna on top of a tall mast…..and cablevision was born in Western Canada!

Way back I had a TV set with a channel 1. Old Halicrafters.

Kids to Goat: “What’s a channel?”

Channel surfing was so much faster then. Well except for the time it took to get up off the sofa and cross the room.

We had three - CBC, CTV, and CBC French.

Had 4:

6 – PBS8 – NBC13 – CBS17 – ABC

At first, cable only expanded up to 12, and 3 were just repeats of the major networks from Kansas City.

And children, THERE WAS NO INTERNET, no social media!!! But still no privacy because there were what was called “party lines” that weren’t any good for pickups.

When GOAT was a KID? Pastis got that one by ALL of you?

If Goat/Paris had mentioned how he had to listen to music those poor kids would probably be scarred for life.

Out in my part of India, we had TV only towards end of the ’70s and one channel at that – in glorious monochrome. We got our first TV set at home somewhere around the same time, and half the nighbourhood would visit to watch when they showed movies on the weekends – talk about a sense of community! Colour TV broadcasts started only in late 1982, and cable TV in the early ’90s finally gave us a taste of how the world viewed TV.

At present, there are hundreds of cable / DTH channels, but the situation is similar to what Bruce Springsteen felt in his song “57 Channels and nothin’ on”…

Telephones only did calls, and the phone didn’t go anywhere.

When I was a kid in the 1960s, we didn’t have a TV.

Admittedly that was because we were the weird family on the block, but other kids couldn’t imagine how we got by without those 8 channels, or 4, or whatever it would have been.

But those 8 channels were known as the Golden Age of television for the enduring quality of their shows.

We had 4 because we lived near Detroit and could pick up CKLW out of Windsor, Ontario. My folks didn’t have a color TV until after I moved away from home.

As they all look up from their devices and ask, “What’s a ‘channel’?”

Not only that, our phones were connected to a wall, had only one ringtone, and couldn’t be used for taking pictures, much less sharing them..

Rotary phones. I still have one, but don’t keep it plugged in.

Why, when I read pig saying that they only had 8 channels, do I hear Springsteen’s “57 Channels (and Nothin’ On)?”

We had 3 channels-Syracuse (NBC), Binghamton (CBS), and Buffalo (ABC) (The latter when the weather was right). Our antenna was on the hill behind the house, with cables going through the trees. It came down in 1971, and we didn’t get TV back on the farm until 1985.

“… and Philo Farnsworth in 1921, when he was 14, worked out the principals of picture transmission that we call television. So what are you kids doing with your free time?”

There wasn’t a single transistor in our whole town.

TV wasn’t really worth watching until Batman came on in the late 60’s, and don’t forget the Monkees.

I grew up in the late 50s and early 60s….I guess I lived in the lap of luxury because I remember SEVEN channels. And Channel 11, WPIX, had the Yankee games broadcast. Of course, the networks all signed off at midnight (test pattern all night) and around 6 or 7am came back on with the flag waving and music playing the Star Spangled Banner. As a kid on a Saturday, you were definitely up to watch the cartoons begin for the day! All black and white and on a tiny screen (which we thought was big).

Back then BC was before cable.

Remember when TVs had vertical and horizontal hold knobs to fix the picture when it rolled or broke up into lines? I don’t miss that.

We had 4, the CBS, ABC, NBC, & PBS affiliates. One of my friends had an outside antenna & they could pick up Rockford & Milwaukee stations too.

Two channels: NBC and CBS. We had a black phone on the wall in our hall, and you had to tell the operator what number you wanted to call :)

Which ones? We only had 7 in New York. (2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13.) Of course, you could diddle around with the UHF, hoping to get a signal of something, so there’s that.

Speaking of no remote, when I was a kid I WAS the remote. My dad would make me walk ALL THE WAY across the room to change the channel dispute the fact he was sitting closest to the TV! Child abuse!! LOL! We lived in Upstate NY and had a huge antenna on a hill. It was a rotary one so we could either tune in the channels from Albany or NYC, which ever were better that day.

Only a couple of channels, but joy of joys, there was “Beanie and Cecil”. Best ever.

… and then there was the plastic knob that always eventually broke so you had a TV with a pair of vice grip pliers attached to it.

Hey! Everyone! Listen up! There is a world out there that you all are missing. If you ever decide to cut the cable cord, (or dish cord), and purchase a digital antenna, you will find that VHF and UHF still exists. You will also find that those old channels that you speak of are still there and they have sub-channels, giving you tons of free movies, weather, you name it. The sub-channels are found by putting in 5.1, or 5.2, etc. By the way, we always had ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, and an independent channel or two on UHF. (By the way UHF stands for Ultra High Frequency, while VHF stands for Very High Frequency. Just thought I’d throw that out there. Seriously though, get an antenna, a good one, and try out free tv.

Ah the Tell Tale Television by everyone over a certain age. And that age changes every generation.

My wife horrifies the grandkids, telling them about growing up in Rio without TV. For myself, I always remember having the old Dumont (see comment above), but they can’t believe my older brother also had no TV, here in the USA, until after I was born. They are also incredulous when I told them about my hand-held device that would “download” music free, without any gig limits. We called it a transistor radio. They would be hysterical if I told them I looked up “incredulous” in a dictionary, rather than Googling it.

EIGHT CHANNELS! BOY, WERE YOU LUCKY! When I was a kid, we only got the one local channel. We could sometimes get a second channel in a city at a further distance, if one person would go out and rotate the pole that the antenna was on, while another person inside yelled out when they got the antenna turned in the right direction.

Oh, the horror! Oh the humanity!

And, 25 years from now, those kids will regale their kids with the horror of today’s cable TV, where there are 1,001 channels, but there’s nothing on.

Happy fourth, but’s only to the people who won’t just focus on a national holiday. We need to remember. I, for one, might be the only one that actually cares. Is it because everyone’s a Democrat. I thought we were united.

Sheesh, how old is goat?

“Muh-mister Goat . . . thuh-that’s not true. Right?”

Pastis: Thank you – NOT! I had suppressed the horrific memory of that time period and you brought it back to the surface!

No Netflix, Hulu or YouTube either. Kids are scarred for life.

2 – Montpelier and Mt Washington

“And when the 3 stations shut down for the night you turned the TV off. I can still see the image go down into a little white dot in the center of the screen and fade away…”

No video games back then either. We played board games, where we had to roll dice and move game pieces by hand. I’m not sure if kids still do that today.

Only one TV channel here in Italy when I was a kid and 3 radio stations . I was born in 1957

it’s wonderful how a simple cartoon strip provides the stimulus for all the fogies to wallow in their memory swamp…

Piffle! Young’uns! I’m so old, I can remember when we had no TV at all!

Three channels when I grew up. And I was the ‘remote’. And the antenna tuner.

I had only 3 and no UHF; sign off at 11:PM

what is UHF?

THE HORROR

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA! THE HORRORRRRR

We had lots of channels…..oh, wait, that was the radio. In the late 40’s and early 50’s we didn’t have a TV. When we finally got one, we had 2 channels in black and white! It all had to do with when you were born. For me, 1947!

When I was a kid, Google didn’t exist and computers had the computing power of a calculator.