THE ROCKAWAY I KNEW
By Matthew Bashie
CHAPTER SIX: MY FIRST TELEVISION SET
I was not permitted to watch the "I Love Lucy" television series when it was being presented for the first time in its original form. My father hated Desi Arnaz and he actually believed that the man's accent was phony.
We did not have a television set in our home until we moved into Wavecrest Gardens, a middle-income housing complex on Beach 20th Street in the Far Rockaway section of Queens. I was eight years old in June of 1952 when we moved in and my dad "acquired"the tv set from his mom's apartment - she was a widow living alone in Sunnyside, Long Island City. My grandma was having trouble hearing and there was no "closed-captioning" back in those days so she was willing to give up her set for her grandson.
What we "inherited" was an Admiral table-model black & white set with an eleven-inch screen. The machine sat in our living room on an old second-hand night table which had been commandeered for use as a television stand to hold the ugly dark-purple plastic box. I remember that the very first television commercial that I ever saw was for a product called "Bond Bread" - actually the commercials were a lot clearer than the television shows which were "dark and dreary" and usually filled with what was then called a "snowy" background. Television broadcasts were only part time and when I got up in the morning, what was on the screen was usually a test pattern and a high-pitched peanut-whistle noise. The television-viewing day would begin at about 7 am and always started off with a picture of the American flag waving somewhere over a national monument and a prerecorded audio of the national anthem.
Television reception was simply terrible in those days. For months, my dad "fooled around" with a series of cheaply-constructed wire "rabbit ears" which sat directly on top of the old machine. He would bend the antenna in one direction or the other, always looking to get a clearer picture - or at least one that didn't roll horizontally over and over again. The building management offered an in-house "hook up" to the roof at an additional monthly expense and finally my dad "gave up" and agreed to pay an additional forty-two cents each month for the privilege of connecting to the roof antennas. It was not money well spent because even with the larger roof system, the reception was still poor to awful.
It didn't take long for our television set to "break down" and within a few months, it "gave up the ghost" (both literally and figuratively) and stopped working. So, I could no longer watch Captain Video via the old DuMont Channel 5, or Howdy Doody on NBC - "brought to you by Wonder Bread - builds strong body in 8 ways!" (Later - 12 ways! Advertising!!). My mom also missed her favorite shows - Beat the Clock - (an early quiz show with MC Bud Collier) and Ed Sullivan's Toast of The Town on Sunday nights. My dad watched the original Jackie Gleason shows and on occasion, the Red Skelton Variety Hour - but my dad didn't like Red all that much because "he laughs at his own jokes."
After a week of "no tv" - my dad carted the old Admiral down to a repair shop that was located on Cornaga Avenue, just half a block east of Central Avenue - north side. The manager of this shop which was in an old one-story wooden run-down building told us that it would probably take a few weeks to a month to get the necessary parts (a new tuner) to fix the set. So, later on that evening, my parents decided to buy "us" a new set and to give the old one back to my grandmother after it was repaired.
My mom didn't want to do the shopping so my dad and I drove back into town and visited the only place (in the area) that sold TV sets at the time - which was a store named "Vim" -
located on the east side of Central Avenue, about five stores north of Cornaga. Although the "Vim" store is still there to this very day, it is now a shoe store and it no longer sells televisions and radios - which is about all that it sold back in 1952. At least someone should recognize and reward that shop for having remained at the exact same location for over 75 years!
My dad decided that he wanted a "console" set - so he settled on a brownish textured model with a brand name "CBS Columbia" - which was a "new one" on me; I had never heard of that brand before (or since). This was a heavy machine and I remember that my dad had to bring the car around to the front of the store (back in those days, Central Avenue was much wider and there were parking meters on both sides of the street) and the store salesman helped my dad lug the huge television set and get it into the trunk of his 1949 Studebaker Champion automobile and then "rope it in" so that it would not fall out onto the street. When we got home, one of our neighbors helped my dad lift the TV out of the car and helped him get it from the parking lot into our apartment. The old television set had given us a poor to awful picture on an eleven-inch screen; the new television set now gave us a poor to awful picture on twenty-one inch screen. Except for the fact that my father was $210. poorer and the glass tube was slightly larger, nothing had really changed. Our original television set took three months to fix and cost an additional $40. and when it was ready to be picked up, my dad brought the repaired TV back to his mother's house in Long Island City.
The night that the new television set arrived in our glorious (dumpy) apartment, I was thrilled that I had television again. It was a Monday night and I remember that the very first show that I watched on it was "I Love Lucy" - the episode where Lucy and Ethel get locked out on the roof of their apartment building and then Ricky and Fred take the garden hose and spray the girls into thinking that it is raining. Like I said before, my dad HATED that show but instead of forbidding me from watching it (which he had always done in the past), he and my mother decided to go for a walk to our local luncheonette for pineapple-vanilla ice cream so they left me alone that night and finally got to watch my favorite show in the comfort and privacy of my own living room.
After the "thrill" of the new television wore off for all of us (by the following week) I was again relegated to watch Lucille Ball anyplace other than in our apartment. I accepted the kind offerings of some of our neighbors and from then on, watched the show in a variety of living rooms other than my own.
The television set that we bought from Vim on a Monday evening back in 1952 lasted almost fifteen years without a repair, and by the time it needed service, it was less expensive in the long run to buy another set than to fix the old one. Early in 1957, one of the automobile dealers in town had a color television on the showroom floor -1 have no idea for what purpose because the place did not sell electronic appliances but I remember seeing the very first color presentation at that car dealer over fifty years ago. It was not until I gained employment for myself and was out on my own that I purchased a color television. It was a 1966 Zenith console machine and after I bought it and set it up in my own apartment, I remember thinking to myself that the picture was poor to awful.
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I always love hearing from my fans and friends. M. B.