GLIMPSES of how Canada worked: a writer's memoir.

5. In 1958 TV arrives...Sport leaves

copyright © 2015 WandaS All rights reserved

HOME TELEVISION SETS FIRST APPEARED in Canada in 1952. In June of '53 Queen Elizabeth II's Coronation provided a huge impetus for sales. In July of 1958, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation completed its national TV network, provoking a lot of talk in the Tely's newsroom about the new medium. Attitudes ranged from "It's just a fad" or "Not many people can afford it so don't worry", to "It's where the news business is going. You should get involved now!" Veteran reporter Helen Allen told me that last comment several times.

Helen had been a generalist at the Tely since 1929 and knew what she was talking about. However, I had barely begun to discover the world of print journalism and wanted to absorb much more before considering other work.

An amazing thing about TV was how many peripherals immediately appeared. The first basic black and white sets were merely containers of metal and heavy plastic made to hold the essential, fragile picture tubes. You bought the size of container you wanted, with an antenna and some wires attached, then placed it on the floor, on a table, on a minimalist wrought iron stand -- wherever you pleased -- and after fiddling with its antenna you saw live programs, or announcers reading newscasts, or old movies. They were available only during the few hours each day when some network was broadcasting. At other times there was snow with static.

The newspaper business was very labour-intensive then, with a long tradition of providing lots of jobs. TV was a blank slate for creative people. Some invented jobs behind and in front of cameras while others designed and realized products to support their work, and still others found ways to attract viewers and hold their attention.

We called early TV antennae "rabbit ears". They either poked up like a 'V' from the back of the basic container or were upgraded into chrome dust-catchers standing on pieces of furniture containing picture tubes. Furniture manufacturers had rushed to dress them in wooden boxes of various sizes, or added picture tubes to consoles which already housed radios and record players. Stereo tuner-amplifiers were added, then tape recorders....

Electronic stuff began taking up more and more space in homes.

Cityscapes changed, too, after TV came along. Rabbit ears were rarely enough to deliver a good signal; line-of-sight was needed.  The highest point of Montreal's Mount Royal was decorated in 1952 with a CBC transmission tower, immediately providing good signal reception for miles around. Torontonians had to wait until 1976 for the CN Tower to do the same for them. In the meantime, awfully ugly antennae were erected on roofs of houses and apartment and office buildings, connected to sets indoors by wires run through the nearest window frame. They were skeletal thingees: metal tubes, with rods of various dimensions held in place by guy wires vulnerable to winds, wildlife, falling branches or trees.

Keeping picture tubes working and antennae secure, and aimed accurately at a transmitter, provided good incomes for countless self-employed men and their families. Clients advertised them by word of mouth. Their stay-at-home wives took phone messages, husbands called a few times a day to collect them, and reached clients as soon as they could. If no one was home, they knew where a spare key was kept.

(When a repairman came to one of my parents' neighbour's house, he found a houseplant knocked to the floor by her dog and the pot broken. He used a broom to clean up, left the earth and pot shards on newspapers on a kitchen counter, wrapped the plant's roots in dampened newspapers and left that on the pile. Then he repaired the TV set and left an invoice for only the time he spent doing that.)

My parents didn't hurry to buy a TV because we saw how it changed friends' behaviours, virtually overnight. Program schedules began to run families' lives, especially in the hours between school or work and supper. A few of my high school classmates dropped after-hours activities such as elocution, music, crafts, even sports, in order to get home in time to watch a favourite TV show. When some parents wouldn't allow a program to be watched at home, teens went to the houses of friends and then claimed they'd done homework.