When I was a tiny, little kid, like being five or six years old, there were only two or three television stations in the entire Bay Area. There was channel 4, an NBC station and channel 5, a CBS station and then channel 7, the ABC station. Years later, channel 2 came along, an independent station in Oakland and then channel 11 in San Jose, an ABC affiliate. And, of course, there certainly weren’t any cable systems to pump a really clear signal into your vacuum tube television set, you had to siphon the signal off the air ways with your aluminum antenna mounted somewhere up on the your roof.
With only two or three stations, obviously, the television viewer didn’t have a hell of a lot of variety, and, come to think of it, the television viewer was probably grateful to get even those two stations when the weather was clear and there weren’t any stray airplanes flying overhead to distort the signal that the antenna was trying to catch. When I was a young toddler back then, I remember the great old cowboy shows that we watched religiously, like “Have Gun, Will Travel,” “Gunsmoke” with Marshall Dylan and Miss Kitty and the “Rifleman” with his specialized, fast repeating rifle and his motherless son. Of course, these were all in black and white colors on a screen about the size of a dinner plate.
However, there was one show on NBC that aired every Wednesday night at 7:00 p.m. that I would never, ever miss; Disneyland. I would make sure that my parents had prepared a huge bowel of popcorn and, in that little kid, overly dramatic, childishly emphatic seriousness, I’d see to it that everyone was comfortably seated and ready to keep their mouths shut for the duration of the show. Except for the commercials, of course. You could make comments and go to the bathroom and refill your personal popcorn bowel from the big, family popcorn bowel in the kitchen during the commercials. Once the Disney logo appeared on the black and white screen, keep absolutely silent, we have to concentrate on every word that came through the speaker on the television set.
