When I was in my teens I was walking down Broadway in Saskatoon and noticed a store with a television set in the window. I had never seen a TV before except in pictures in magazines so this caught my attention. It was not operational because there was no television in Saskatoon until 1954. I stood and looked in the store window and wondered how a live picture could possibly appear in such a box shaped piece of furniture in the same way as voices were heard on radios, it really seemed impossible.
In 1953 our family moved to Toronto and en route we stayed overnight in a motel south of the border. There was a television in a small sitting room near the registration desk and it was the first operating TV I had ever seen. A sitcom was on, something like My Little Margie or whatever and to me it was amazing. I only watched for a few minutes because the parents quickly hustled us off to bed and we continued our journey first thing in the morning.
After we moved into our new home in Toronto and our furniture arrived, one of the first things my father bought was a television set. We could not believe we actually owned a television with an antenna that towered up on the roof of our house (an antenna was a status symbol in those days, it showed that you owned a TV) We even took a picture of our new TV with family members standing next to it. This was something quite extraordinary. All the houses in the neighbourhood had these same ugly metal contraptions above their homes and with the outstretched arms we were able to get one channel, the CBC. Broadcasts were during the day and evening only but not overnight, in fact they would close their broadcast day with the national anthem. The broadcast and TV pictures were often less stable and sometimes the picture would flicker and roll from the top to the bottom of the screen so everyone became an expert at adjusting the TV. The TVs of those days had tubes and eventually we learned how to repair our own TVs by taking the suspicious tubes down to the local drugstore where we could test and replace them. Sounds quite unimaginable now but that's how we did things in 1958. We had our favourite shows and of course the Howdy Doody Show, Percy Saltzman, the weatherman, and Hockey Night in Canada with Foster Hewitt. The children's shows, the National News, local and world events, it was a whole new world. European events in real time were out of reach as videos of events had to be sent to Canada for broadcasting later. We could only get live audio but not video so it was a big deal years later when we started getting live TV from Europe.
One show I should mention was the Ed Sullivan Show. This was a popular Sunday night variety presentation and had a few guests who were quite noteworthy. Elvis Presley was set to appear but I guess Ed had concerns about his sexy hip movements so had directions to the cameramen that he was only to be photographed from the waist up. Quite funny really but we didn't know what the fuss was about until years later when we saw videos of his performances and the swinging hips. A movie called Bye Bye Birdie was based on the Elvis appearance on Ed Sullivan. A group that also attracted a lot of attention were the Beattles who had taken the UK by storm. We had never heard of them but when they arrived in America it was a big performance so of course we all had to watch the Beattles on the Ed Sullivan Show in February, 1964. Shows such as Ed Sullivan were broadcast live in those days.
As newly weds in 1956 one of our purchases was a used 16 inch TV in a cabinet with doors. With the arrival of television, the furniture arrangement in peoples' living rooms changed so that chairs would be facing the screen, something that wasn't a concern in the days of radio. In 1960 pay TV was established on an experimental basis in parts of Toronto. First run movies were shown and to activate them we had to put money in the coin box sitting on top of the TV. We eventually moved to Montreal so don;t know how long the coin operated system lasted.
We had a black and white TV for many years and it wasn't until we moved to Calgary in 1969 that we purchased a colour TV. The first colour TV we saw was at our neighbour Roy's house in Burlington. Roy was a TV technician and he would invite us over on Sunday evenings to watch Bonanza in colour. His company had loaned the set to him and in those days (1964) colour sets were quite a challenge to repair. They were expensive and needed ongoing adjustment. Even a slight movement of a TV in the room required a readjustment by a technician. When we bought our colour set in Saskatoon the unsightly antenna on the roof had been replaced by cable and we were able to get additional channels including the bluevee movie channel which caused some problems for parents.
Eventually as we started getting a selection of U.S. channels the availability of channels progressed to where we are today.
