"Back in my day..."

I'm at the age where I enjoy regaling my son with tales about how hard life was “back in the day” when I was a kid. One of my go-to hard luck stories is about having to “warm up” the television set.

The television in our living room was in a big wooden console with a whopping 23-inch screen. There was no such thing as a remote control, or if there was, we didn't have one. The same knob that you turned to power up the TV was also used to adjust the volume. There was another knob that you could turn to select one of the three or four channels that was available back then. Once you clicked the power knob, a small dot would appear in the center of the screen, and after what seemed like an eternity, the dot would gradually expand and reveal the full picture. It was imperative that you allowed plenty of time to warm up the TV prior to your show, or you risked missing the first couple of minutes of it. To make matters worse, you were never guaranteed a good quality picture since that often depended on the weather and other factors.

I came across the following advertisement from Illinois Power while looking through the September 24, 1964 issue of The Raymond News and it reminded me about our television woes back then. The struggle was real!