Quote:
Originally posted by Tubejunke
Man, that is spectacular to say the least! I would probably crap my pants if I saw that thing at a thrift store or anywhere for a reasonable price. I never find roundies here in Virginia. One reason for that I think is that television didnt really catch on in these here hills until around 1952. That is post roundie production as we all well know. There would have been no used sets as the whole thing was a new idea. At least in small town America.....
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I don't know when TV actually took off here or where I formerly lived. However, your post got me to thinking. I live in a small town 30 miles from Cleveland, near Lake Erie. We have had cable here for years (as long as I've been here and longer than that), but I often wonder how folks got along without it back in the '50s and early '60s. TV reception in this area is fair to poor at best on VHF channels without cable, with one station (NBC channel 3) being nearly unwatchable on an antenna, if the station comes in at all--which it doesn't, as a rule. (Ironically, the four UHF stations serving Cleveland come in very well here using an indoor antenna, with channel 61, the city's Spanish-language Univision station [wouldn't you know it], coming in the best of all! Go figure.)
Most everyone here has cable or satellite today. However, I often see the remnants of old TV antennas on roofs of houses here--the owners just seem to have let the antennas fall apart and blow away, replacing them with a cable hookup or satellite system. There is a building down the street from me with what once was a high-power all-channel TV antenna on a 25-foot (more or less) tower with a broadband amplifier and a rotor; I say "once was" because the antenna has lost all of its longer elements to windstorms and snowstorms (we often get strong wind gusts blowing in off the lake, especially in the winter). However, the antenna looks like it is still in use, as I often see it pointing in different directions to get stations from Cleveland, Erie, Pa., Buffalo, etc. so it and the rotor must still be working after a fashion; that or the antenna is so loose on the mast, every time the wind blows it turns the antenna windmill fashion. If this is the case, I would guess the rotor was destroyed or had burned out years ago).
As to whether or not TV was a "new idea" in my small town in the early fifties, I really can't say because I've only lived here four and a half years; however, the small Cleveland suburb I grew up in and lived in 40 years before moving here had the same situation. Black-and-white TV was popular in my hometown then, so I'm told, but color didn't begin to show up until the mid-'60s, and even then I only knew one family on our street with a color set. Most people in my hometown also have cable and have taken down the old antennas, so the street I grew up on as a boy looks pretty good, with no traces of broken-down 50+-year-old VHF-only TV aerials. (Why don't they do the same where I live now? There are still at least two 1950s-vintage VHF conical antennas here yet, and they are falling apart, of course. These broken antennas are eyesores, to put it mildly.)
I see old TVs on curbs here every once in a while, but no roundies--yet, anyhow. The last big set I saw, about two years (?) ago, was a late-'70s 25" RCA color console down the street from me. Would have tried to snag it, but I live in a small apartment and have no room for anything that big (the stand my TV and VCR are on is just a bit smaller than a small console, but fits nicely in a corner of my apartment). Where I used to live, I once had fully half the basement full of old TVs, all trash-day finds, but only one roundie--a 1951 Majestic 16" set my aunt had given me when she moved in the late '60s. I only had the chassis from that one, though, as she broke up the cabinet
!!! and put it out with her trash before she sold her house. Too bad, as that was a nice mahogany cabinet with antique-bronze door pulls on the doors in front of the CRT. The TV chassis, however, worked well on the attic antenna in my house until I moved (the first time) in 1972. Unfortunately, the chassis, along with all but three of the old sets I had accumulated (including a 23" Zenith console I had completely retubed and had working almost like a Swiss watch by the time I moved), went out with the trash a month or so beforehand.
