You may ask: “WTF is an antenna?”
Here’s a bedtime story…..
As daddy aged, he became as obsessed with TV as I was………at age four. He had to have perfect reception (No cable invented yet…….this was the Ice Age). Philadelphia seemed like the other side of the Pacific. Storms and regularly disruputed his viewing pleasure.
So he dispensed with ‘Rabbit ears’ (a colloquial term used for Two three-foot antennae that sat on your set) and built himself a huge antenna in the back yard. Off we go to a large hardware store a half-hour away. I have to accompany Mr. Do It Yerself, for no good reason; maybe I was expected to suddenly be fascinated with the technology and lust for more information. Hey–I WAS smart. I knew that all this crap was just for him and that the only time I would get anything out of it was when he wasn’t home!
At the time we had a big station wagon, so all the boxes got crammed in and I had to sit in the back and hold one box down, since part of it stuck out of the window.
Not hard to assemble. Long poles fit together, duct tape as insurance. The wire is smothered in yards of tape. Then we hoist the poles, next to the nearest Washing line pole. Steel clamps secure it. But it was a monster–20 feet high and the arms were 5+ feet across at the top. Man, if this didn’t pull in TV from Tokyo, something was just not right in the universe.
Getting the wire in the house becomes a saga. The windows into the dining room have never been opened; the shades were frozen closed. By this time, daddy hated sunshine. All windows in our house were closed and shades down, except the kitchen (which he only sat in to eat). He has to pry a window open with a screwdriver, cursing and grimacing all the way.
In the midst of this, psycho neighbor appears and tells daddy he is violating zoning laws and must take the antenna down. However, being on borough council meant that daddy had already perused the zoning. Psycho neighbor is dismissed rudely, and of course the neighbor promises to return with a copy of the zoning regs to force the antenna down. Heh.
And, just like some weird sitcom, the antenna has to be adjusted to get perfect reception. This becomes a three person operation. Mom watches the set, tells me when it was better (channel 3 NBC was the hard one to get), I relay to dad, who has loosened the clamps and turns the antenna.
Eventually, it’s done and we now get a great picture, plus this new thing called UHF–stations not on the dial. Philly had 17, 29, and 48. These were interesting to me as they ran a lot of movies and reruns of stuff like The Honeymooners and Peter Gunn.
He’s so proud and happy, ginning like an orang. But no, we don’t join him. He watches crap. I have more interesting stuff in my room–books and radio. Mom is marking papers and she has a tiny set in the bedroom if there’s something she wants to see.
I should note that this was when we started subscribing to TV Guide magazine, where I was employed as the magazine began its death throes 20 years later.