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TV History: Christmastime and Color Television
When I was a kid, children’s books had holiday stories about getting in the family car and driving to Grandma’s farm. (Schoolbooks back then were usually old and worn, and the cars in the pictures had that lumpy round prewar look, so strange to “modern” kids of the Fifties). Amid the ducks and the horses and the sheep, they’d chop down a tree at dawn on Christmas morning and decorate it with candles and strings of popcorn. Then, after a big country breakfast, they’d go to church. More strange stuff: they had “ministers”, not priests, and they were addressed as “Doctor” or “Reverend”, not as “Father”. Weird place, the American countryside. We used to wonder if it really existed. Christmas was nothing like that where we lived.
This was the New York City of The Honeymooners era, of West Side Story. You see a bit of it in The Godfather. For the price of a subway token, you could visit Macy’s, Gimbels, the F.A.O. Schwartz toy store, the gigantic Lionel train layout at Madison Hardware on 23rd Street, and the big tree at Rockefeller Center, a convenient stroll from St. Patrick’s Cathedral. (Protestants had their own cathedral farther uptown, St. John the Divine.) New York was always a city of tiny apartments. Back then it was also a time of big families; I was the oldest of six boys. Everyone had lots of relatives nearby. Grandparents almost invariably had European accents of one kind or another (In my family, a thick Scottish burr; in my wife’s family, Yiddish). The city’s churches and synagogues were packed year round, but Easter/Passover and Christmas/Hanukkah took it to the highest level.
In the outside world, the Cuban Missile Crisis had just happened. Kennedy was regarded as “our” president—Catholic, that is—and his picture was up in nearly every barbershop. The newsletter of the Knights of Columbus always referred to the President as “Brother Knight, John”. Christmastime 1962 had no inkling of what Christmastime 1963 would be like.
(c) 1957 MAD Magazine, EC Publications
Just like now—in fact, much more even than now—Christmas specials made TV a must-see for families. And there was no better way to see the shows than to visit those rare relatives who had color TV, the better to see the glories of Christmas with Perry Como, Andy Williams, Walt Disney, and the Cartwright boys on Bonanza. One of my uncles in the Bronx had color, so we trooped up there annually to park the crowded streets, climb flights and flights of stairs and watch TV together. In 1962, the season’s big hit was Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol, with music by actual Broadway composers (their next job was writing “People” for Barbra Streisand). Walt Disney called the producers the morning after NBC ran Magoo. Ol’ Walt was never noted for being particularly generous to rivals, but he told them they’d created something not just for their children, but for their children’s children’s children. Pretty big compliment coming from him.
Color television was magic then. People would stand in front of TV store windows, fascinated by even the commercials. But almost nobody actually had a set; out of roughly 80 million TVs sold, by 1962 color, on sale for eight years had slowly, painfully climbed to nearly a million; about 1 percent of the American market. Yet everyone loved it, and everyone wanted it. So why was it so rare? Because it was unbelievably expensive, roughly the cost of three “regular” black and white TVs. In 1954, it cost $1000, equivalent to a modest little $9,268 today. By 1962, it cost $495. (a mere $4,078 today). By 1970, most new sets were color, and people began replacing their black and white sets faster. Only a few years earlier, though, color TV was like jet travel; a futuristic luxury mostly reserved for the well to do.
The TV specials helped sell color sets. Magazines were full of ads showing family dads, all but smothered with affection for bringing home color for Christmas. NBC was owned by RCA, the mighty Radio Corporation of America, the strongest and richest electronics company in the world. RCA sank a fortune into developing color and was stuck with the solitary job of putting it over with the public. That’s why they paid a mint to pull Disney away from ABC and bring him to NBC. The fact that his show was named Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color tells you all you need to know about their motivations. Disney had only two sponsors, RCA (which owned the network) and Kodak, the other major American corporation that stood to make lots of money from widespread adoption of color.
As for us, we ended up being the first family on the block to get color, late in 1963. it was still expensive, but my dad had friends in the Teamsters Union that were able to provide sets that had somehow “fallen off a truck”, landing right on the serial numbers. My wife’s family never did get color until I gave my father-in-law a set in the mid-Eighties; they shared what Jonah Goldberg once described as “My people’s traditional resistance to unnecessary expenditure”. Pretty soon, black and white was restricted to closed circuit security cameras, and old re-runs. As time went by, most local TV stations wouldn’t even bother buying or running black and white shows.
As a kid, I never thought I’d see a world where everyone had color TV, but fewer and fewer people went to Mass on Christmas morning.
Published in General
We got a color TV in 1968. It was a big deal.
OK, but it’s their stretch. The NBC announcer says, “And introducing Miss Barrie Chase!”
I guess that means that I wasn’t missing anything, color wise. We got a second TV station, a CBS affiliate, in 1964, only NBC before that. Choice was a bigger deal than color.
Muleskinner, by any chance did you see the first one of this series? It sounds like it might describe the kind of TV market you grew up in.
No, I missed it. But, yes it was one of those areas. Mamma Skinner said that they had one of the first TV sets in town, around 1950. She said it was a big deal, but the distance was such that unless the weather was clear, the picture was hard to make out.
Wow
Every slum in India is covered with satellite dishes. It is what people want.
We grew up without television. Period. Books, records, and the occasional trip to the movies. I saw Neal Armstrong’s Moon walk in black and white because we were visiting my maternal grandparents at the time.
It was the Princess Di wedding that broke the domestic ban, as my father went out and rented a television for the over the air broadcast. He served my mother and the girls scones and tea, I believe.
Now they have the widescreen, cable, etc., mostly for PBS Masterpiece Theater and mysteries, for baseball games, and for DVDs, and now streaming movies.
My own first regular TV viewing was in a college dorm common room, where we all watched Hill Street Blues, followed by a break for more study or Cheers, after which we all reassembled for the local evening news and Tony Ventrella’s Wrestling Hold of the Week! Big time wrestling with moves replayed in slow motion, in reverse, with move-by-move commentary, and with big flashing warning signs to not try this at home. Must see TV.
I did not bother with a TV in Germany, but bought a 19 inch combination TV/VCR player in Korea, catching AFN and a Korean station in the occasional free hour.
By the time we got to reasonably priced flat screens, I had “cut the cable,” or more accurately transitioned to internet only.
Technology was expensive then. And houses, college, and medical care were cheap.
Color TV was very difficult to implement in 1950’s consumer technology. The picture tube alone was significantly more complex and expensive.
The big problem was that the new color television standard had to be completely compatible with the existing black-and-white broadcasts. So the NTSC Color system actually transmits a black-and-white image, with the coloring information, two dimensions worth, at much lower resolution, modulated on top of that. So color tv sets have to pull all those signals out and reconstruct the original RGB color.
It’s not easy. Gory details on Wikipedia here: NTSC and here: YIQ Color Space
Color TV also had the triple-chicken-and-egg problem; there is less incentive to purchase an expensive color TV if there are few color shows on, and there is less incentive to create color shows when there are so few color sets, and the price of color sets won’t come down until the quantities go up.
[Added: I just made up the term “triple chicken-and-egg problem”.]
Wow. I didn’t know that.
Y’all saw it here first!
noD has it right; it took either a government broadcasting bureaucracy, a steel-nerved visionary in for the long haul, or a reckless madman to pour money into color years before it could reach a break-even point. Canada, Europe and the UK went with the bureaucracy. We went with Sarnoff and the RCA crew, mostly steel-nerved technical visionaries touched with just a capitalist tinge of reckless, cashflow-mis-planning madmen.
I’d like to do a post about the history and technology of color TV. This week’s was more about the consumer end, at least as seen from a remove of 56 years from the world of driving an hour through city traffic to see Mitch Miller and the Ray Coniff Singers in color. But the tech was always fascinating.
NTSC, or as we referred to it in the business, “Never The Same Color.”
And (as noted a few weeks ago) Bill Paley went into a snit when CBS Labs’ color wheel lost the battle with RCA’s electronic color in front of the FCC in ’53, because the agency decided to go with the system comparable with the B&W sets already on the market. CBS ran a handful of shows in color during the 1954-55 season (of which the only one currently accessible on YouTube is the season premiere of Burns & Allen) and an occasional show like Red Skelton after that, but really refused to promote RCA’s system by running color shows until enough sets finally were in homes by the 1965-66 season, and after CBS had almost lost the ratings war to NBC in the 1964-65 season (ABC didn’t have the same vindictive reason as CBS for not airing color shows — they just didn’t have the money to justify the equipment. But the prime-time cartoons the network was fond of in the early 60s were the first color broadcasts ABC ran, in the 1962-63 season).
It wasn’t fun watching The Wonderful World of Disney in Living Color on a black and white TV. In addition there was only one TV in the house. I’m sure everyone has stories about the tussles over which show to watch. I was the oldest and Mom was working a second job at night so I usually won those. In ’74 I came back at Christmas Break during freshman year at college and “voila” there was a color TV at home. Oh well, don’t think I missed much not growing up with one.
Brings back memories. When one of the families on our street of about 20 homes got a color TV it was a big deal. I was thrilled when invited over to watch Bonanza, the first color Western(?), with them.
I cannot confirm the details with my father any longer, but I recall him getting a “used” color TV in the very early 60’s. I can definitely recall the Sunday line up with Walt’s Wonderful World of Color, and the cartoons Christmas specials.
As a young man my father in the early 50’s was interested in the emerging field of “electronics” and chose to spend his free time working (probably unpaid) at a TV repair shop on Long Island NY. I met the gentleman once or twice in the late 60’s and he seemed terribly old at the time, however he was also disabled with some sort of eye disease that made him functionally and legally blind. I think he was also a veteran since I also recall him using cane like supports for getting around.
Dad always refers to him as “Blind Johnny Litza”, and I recalled asking dad how he came to repair TVs if he could not see? Well in the era before solid state electronic parts, all of the components were large, and tended to be potted with various pre plastics resin type materials (like Bakelite), and when the potted items failed (typically from over heating) they emitted distinct odors. Vacuum tubes also hummed when they operated and had signature sounds to the disconcerting ear when they where not humming correctly (i.e. something failed and the incorrect voltage was now singing a different tune).
So my dad during his high school year and early college years came to Johnny’s shop, and was his eyes, hands, and muscle for fixing his customer’s very expensive (and heavy) TVs. Dad learned a lot of practical engineering from the experience, something he passed on when we were getting weened. Do things with your hands, don’t be afraid to muck up, carry those lessons on in your professional life.
We were not rich by any means. So when dad started the family in 1957, and to have a color TV by ~1962, well I am guessing that Dad got a set from Johnny that was too expensive for the current owner to repair and probably traded up, and the set could be made to work from the spare parts from other TV ‘s that were abandoned in Johnny’s repair shop.
Lots of lessons realized in recalling this bit of my Father’s history. I hope some of it is carried through to my boys 40 years from now.
Wow, that is quite a coincidence. My father bought our first color TV, a 13 inch ( as I remember it) ‘portable’ (heavy but it had a handle!) Zenith, so we could watch the moon landing. He ‘recorded’ it by making an 8MM color film of the TV screen with his handheld movie camera!
That TV lasted over 50 years. They don’t make them like that any more.
I think I know the TV you mean; think it was a GE. It was something of a sensation that Christmas because it cost $269, about $100 less than the 19-inch sets that had been the price leaders.
I saw one, many years later (circa mid-Eighties) at the home of Samuel Goldwyn,Jr. For a rich guy, I admired his thrift–he bought a bargain, and kept it 16 years.
Oops, I mis typed that. It lasted over 30 years, not 50!
Milwaukee’s WITI-TV had a unique situation between 1956 and 1959. They broadcast live color TV…without cameras. The generic process is called “flying spot scanning”. The studio was blacked out and an extremely bright raster (a blank white TV picture) was projected on the announcer or newsman. Photocells picked up the reflected signal; in Du Mont’s Vitascan process, separate red, green, and blue-filtered photocells were combined. Incredibly, it worked; a studio that in reality was almost pitch black looked like a normally lit set on the screen.
Photography without a camera. And no one remembers a thing about it.
Wow, that’s delightfully crazy.
I’ll bet the process created some interesting artifacts, due to reflections, and dispersion, and all.
Huh… a modern version might be a cool art project. Lasers and higher resolution can display the artifacts better.
The photocells were placed and aimed as if they were lights, and like lights, they could do things like backlight an actress’s hair, or eliminate a nose shadow. Just adjusting the mix of cells could transform a picture.
You’re right; it would make a great art project.
About 20 years ago one of our sets “died”. The raster collapsed, so the whole picture was one single line tall. By accident I discovered that a mirror, which rotated, could show the whole picture if I gave it a spin. If I’d attached a crank or other similar device, it wold have been unique: a TV picture that you couldn’t see on screen, only in the reflection of a spinning mirror.
My parents still had a black and white until shortly before I was born, and what prompted them to finally get the color set was, well, me. I think my grandparents still had black and white sets till about 1980 (those giant Zenith floor models). I know my grandmother still had a small B&W in her bedroom until after my grandfather died in 1984.
That’s something I didn’t mention in the post: Console sets. Until the mid-Seventies, or thereabouts, television sets were often/usually in wooden cabinets, making them even bulkier and heavier. Trade Secret: almost every brand of Fifties-Sixties color TV used RCA picture tubes, and often an RCA-licensed chassis as well. The pictures were all either 19 or 21 inches, so there was very little to differentiate brands and models except external appearance. That’s one reason for the elaborate carpentry. Sets had pretentious model names–“The Fleetwood, $795”. Or in the MAD Magazine parody of an RCA ad at the top of the post, “The Suckerbait, $495”. The consoles often had a stereo phonograph as well.
Oh, yes! I forgot about the built in phonograph that my dad’s folks set had. Complete with a tall spindle with a toggle to drop another queued platter when the playing one stopped. On Christmas my grandma would be able to keep Perry Como on near endless play.
Until the mid-to-late Fifties, we had phonographs, newly bought to play 33 1/3 rpm LPs. Then the high fidelity craze, loosely affiliated with the intellectually prestigious worlds of classical music and jazz, became a snobby hobby among late Fifties trendies. High fidelity meant that unpretentious phonographs were replaced by separate components. Record changers became the norm. That, plus an open reel tape deck, meant the Hefner-esque would-be seducer of 1960 could be assured of uninterrupted performances of Bolero, Miles Davis or Nat King Cole.
And then the tide reversed. Stereophonic records had narrower grooves, more easily damaged by being stacked and dropped by a record changer. From the late Sixties on, changers were out and plain turntables were in.
My grandparents had that in the ’60s, it also had a radio. Both the stereo and the radio had died twenty years later when my grandmother passed away, but the TV still worked.
While we never had a color TV in our home (even my wife and I didn’t get one until the mid-80s), around 1960 my parents purchased a stereo system. I remember it as having two giant speaker cabinets. We didn’t have the color TV, but our stereo was the wonder of the neighborhood and came in handy when I became a teenager and wanted to impress the girls.