From 1950 until WQAD came on the air in 1963, we had two TV stations. Before that, both WHBF and WOC had secondary affiliations with ABC to carry that network's flagship programs (i.e. Ozzie and Harriet, Disney, The Mickey Mouse Club, Lone Ranger), although I don't remember which station carried which. If you wanted to watch other ABC programming you needed a good aerial or rooftop antenna to pick up WCRG in Cedar Rapids.
Random things I remember about TV in that era:
Each network sounded a tone at the top of the hour. CBS's sounded like a ding, and NBC's sounded like a beep. NBC's was about 5 seconds behind CBS's, so if nobody else was watching TV, I'd listen to CBS's tone and then quickly switch to NBC to hear theirs. It didn't take much to amuse me back then.
The Phantom Channel: Channels 2, 3, and 7 through 13 all showed "snow," as there was no receivable programming then. Station 5 was the phantom channel, which showed a snowy version of channel 6. At the time, I didn't understand why that didn't work for channel 3 showing the same thing for channel 4.
Before television went digital, you could get the audio for channel 6 on the far left (87.5) of the FM dial.
TV stations didn't stay on 24/7 then. In the late 1960's, most TV started at about 6 a.m. with the farm reports and ended at about 1:00 a.m. with a movie or variety show. WHBF was usually off the air first, followed by NBC and then ABC. One weekend night, I remember watching the late movie on WHBF, followed by the religious segment, the technical and legal disclosures (accompanied by The Television Seal of Good Practice) and of course, the National Anthem. When the anthem had ended, I tuned to WOC, only to see the last four bars of the National Anthem again, followed by snow. Bored, I tuned to WQAD --- and AGAIN saw the last four bars of the National Anthem. The stations had managed to go off the air within a minute of each other. It was scary to say the least.
Prior to transistorization, TV's in that day operated on vacuum tubes. These were connected to sockets in the set. When one went bad, the picture would be dim, weak, or non-existent. At that point, Dad would change to another channel. If the other channel was working correctly, he'd say "It's them," and nothing more would be done. If all of the channels were bad, he'd say: "It's us," remove the back of the set, and start pulling the tubes. We'd go to the Schlegel's store, where there was a big podium-like contraption with lots of sockets. Dad would plug each tube in, read the analog dial with the red, yellow, and green zones, and go looking in the drawers of the podium device for replacement tubes. This usually solved the problem.
Sometimes that didn't help, or no tubes were bad, If fooling with the horizontal and vertical controls didn't help, then, after a long argument with Mom about how Dad was NOT going to fool around inside the back of the set (even an unplugged set carried a lot of nasty voltage), Mom would call the TV repairman, which wasn't cheap even back then. On one such occasion, the man, who was a member o our church, spent about 3 minutes looking at the insides of the set, proclaimed: "Here's the problem! This wire came loose. He took a screwdriver to tighten the wire and tried the set. It worked fine. "That'll be 15 dollars" (about $110 in today's money), he announced.
"$15?" Dad repeated, annoyed. "For one minute of work?"
"Well, Frank," the repairman told Dad, "it's three bucks for the service call."
"Okay," Dad nodded.
"And I'm charging you two bucks to tighten the wire," the man continued.
"That's reasonable," Dad admitted.
"I'm charging you ten bucks," the man concluded, "for knowing WHICH wire to tighten."
