TV Comes to Pocomoke, and I get Fired from my First Job,

For a couple of years when I was in elementary school, we lived in an apartment on Willow Street.  Across the street from our apartment was a furniture and appliance store. I was a frequent visitor to this store. Why? You may ask; what could be in a furniture store of the 1950s that would so fascinate an 8 or 9 year old boy? The answer: television sets.

 

The early days of television in Pocomoke were - to say the least - interesting. Pocomoke purchasers of TV sets in the early fifties probably did not realize the adventure that awaited. First of all, you couldn't just buy the TV set.  You had to get an antenna and then you had to get an installer to go up on your roof to mount the antenna as high up as possible atop whatever building you lived in. 

 

But it didn't end there.  You then had to be able to point the antenna at the transmission tower of the TV station you wanted to watch.  The cheapest way to do this was with a hand crank mechanism near a window of the house.  You would open the window, unfold the crank and start turning it. The crank was attached to spindle gear that in turn connected to another set of gears and sprockets which eventually turned the antenna.  And you did this while watching the picture on TV so you could stop when you got the best picture. If you could spend a little more money, you could get a motorized antenna with a controlling piece of electrical gear (a rotor box I think they were called) that sat on top of the TV.  (Note: if you lived in a city, you needed none of that; signals were locally strong and all you needed was the "rabbit ears" antenna on top of your TV.)

 

So there were TV stations to tune to in Philadelphia (point the antenna north-northeast), Baltimore (northwest), Washington D.C. (west-northwest), Richmond (west-southwest), and Norfolk (south).  But even with the antenna properly pointed, getting a good signal was a hit and miss proposition. Weather, atmospheric conditions, planes flying overhead all wreaked havoc with the signals. The Norfolk and Philadelphia stations were on some of the same channels and loved to interfere with each other. And there was vertical roll, and horizontal roll.  Before we got our own set, friends or relatives would call us, "Hey come on over, TV's coming in really good," and by the time we got there - nothing but a snow filled screen. Most of the time, good reception did not last for more than a few minutes at a time. Sometime you would start watching a show on the Philadelphia station, lose the signal after ten minutes but rotate around to the Baltimore station for the next ten, and then maybe back where you started to finish the show.

 

Still, having a TV was a big deal; I still remember the day when we got our first TV set. But that's another story to be told.

 

And that brings me back to that furniture store.  The TV sets for sale in that store always had a good picture. Did they have special, better antennas?  So, after school I would wander in there and watch some TV.  I remember once watching part of a World Series game.  The salesmen in the store got to know me and they seemed to like me.  In hindsight, I realize that I was filling a similar role to that of a puppy.

 

One day, one of the salesmen said to me, "Would you like a job? You're here anyway, want to be useful?"  So they told me that if twice a week I would dust all of the furniture and TV sets and sweep the floor, I would get a quarter.  Now that was too good an offer to refuse because 1 - I was there watching TV anyway, and 2, you don't realize the spending power that gave me.  With a quarter, I could buy a bottle of Nehi soda, a Hershey bar, and a Superman comic book! And so I went to work, my very first job.

 

One day, I was in there dusting this big new beautiful console TV, in a gorgeous mahogany cabinet.  I was dusting the top, when suddenly, by itself, the TV turned on, and then started switching channels - all by itself!.

One of the salesmen came running over,  "What did you do?  Don't fool with these - you might break it!" He seemed mildly angry.  "But, but, I, I didn't, I was just . . . "  I stammered, tried to explain.   "Well just be careful!"

A minute or two later, the next TV set over.  I barely touch it, and it blares on, real loud.  I look over and both of the salesmen are glaring at me, with wide eyes.  Again I start to explain my innocence, but they are now laughing, laughing.  And then they showed me.  The very first TV remote control which they had used to turn on the set and flip the channels when I dusted it.  This remote used a beam of light, it looked like a flashlight but with a pistol grip; very similar to the appearance of the Phasor weapons in Star Trek a dozen or so years later.

 

I loved fooling with the remote myself.  I even tried to run the same gag on another kid who was in the store one day (It didn't work - he had already seen the remote gizmo). They really didn't want me to fool with it too much - it did use batteries and they wore out quickly, but - despite repeated warnings, I could not resist playing with that toy every time I came in to "work."  One day I dropped it; it didn't break but the batteries fell out.  My salesmen friends ushered me to the back to the manager's office who gave me the bad news, gently. They really liked me but children are not allowed in the store without a parent; it was the rules. I should come in and visit, but bring my Mom or Dad.

 

There I am. Fired. Career in ruins! and I'm not even ten years old!! Of course, the entire span of this job, from start to finish, was 3, or possibly 4 weeks at most. But in any case, I never included it on my resume, or mentioned it on a job application when asked: Have you ever been involuntarily terminated from any employment?  After all they were just following the rules.

 

Author's  note: The story above is true, but full disclosure, I have probably conflated a few different events here, because the timeline does not quite agree with known facts. First, WBOC-TV, channel 16 came on the air in 1954 when I was 9 years old, and - while it required yet a different type antenna, good reception was basically no longer a problem after that. Probably , the TV sets in the furniture store had good reception all of the time because they were tuned to channel 16.  Secondly, the remote devise that I describe was definitely the Zenith Flashmatic - see below.  And a little internet research shows that it did not come on the market until 1955 by which time we no longer lived on Willow St. - MW

(Reader comments)

 Anonymous said...

When I was in junior high one of our teachers arranged for us to walk a short distance up Market Street from the old Pocomoke High school to Johnny's TV shop (east side of Market) to watch Eisenhower's inauguration for a second term.

 Anonymous said...

"...one of our teachers arranged for us to walk a short distance up Market Street..."

Now the Board of Education would charter a fleet of buses to take the students the 10 blocks. Can't have vulnerable children being exposed to all the dangers out there!

 Anonymous said...

I remember that the early television sets were made to receive only channels 2 to 13. So if you had one of these sets when channel 16 came on you had to have a converter box hooked up to your television to receive it. In the first half of the 1950's most homes in Pocomoke didn't have a television and you could tell that by the number of antennas you saw. In later years cable came along and for those who were willing or able to pay for it they could count on seeing a good picture from the Baltimore and Washington stations. But if you lived away from town cable wasn't available.

 Anonymous said...

Yes, the TV sets back then received channels 2 through 13 but Captain Kangaroo occasionally had a fellow on his show who lived at (in?) Channel One!
Go figure.        

tk for PPE says: Originally there was a VHF Channel One but the FCC dropped it in 1948 due to technical issues with reception.  The Captain Kangaroo show referenced it anyway in their storyline according to our reader's comment.