Wow, I Got Color TV

I could not let this otherwise innocuous day pass without observing a significant personal anniversary. Fifty years ago--and I shudder to admit that I have any clear memories of 50 years and past, but sic transit all of us--a large box was delivered to my apartment in Rego Park, New York. It contained an RCA Color TV, which doesn't seem very significant now, but at that juncture was a Great Innovation. We were probably the first family on the block (at least of all those we knew) to have purchased a color set, and it set off a string of amusing memories that I still share with my mother and brother.

How detailed those memories are! I recall the serviceman explaining the positives and negatives of the color picture--how greens and blues were great, but red was often not fully saturated, or tended to the green side (that's when we had "tint" buttons and other myriad adjustment knobs). He also warned us that while live and film pcitures would be crisp, videotape color was still a little primitive. It didn't matter to us--the few programs that were actually telecast in color were so phantasmagoric a change from the usual black-and-white that even greenish skin tones were captivating.

Very quickly my parents' bedrrom, where the TV sat, became a neighborhood hub. All our neighbors would stroll in, and a band of friends would make scheduled visits to see the few programs actually colorcast. My brother and I would call these visitors "The Moochers,", and every evening the table talk at dinner included speculation as to which Moochers would appear uninvited at our door. In those days TV Guide had a list of those programs, many of which I've committed to memory. The very first broadcast we saw was "Racing at Hialeah." Then there was Kraft Music Hall, whose first offer we saw multi-hued was a rendition of "The Tempest," starring Maurice Evans and Roddy McDowell as Puck (quite a memory, huh?)B ut what really entranced us were these wonderful commercials where colorful recipes were prepared, almost all of them involving Velveeta, which shone in tasty golden hues. Another favorite of our crowd was Kathryn and Arthur Murray's Dance Studio, which featured ballroom dancing in elegant gowns. It entertains me not just to recall how vivid those flowing raiments were, but how ahead of its time the Arthur Murray Show was, predating "Dancing with the Stars" by 45 years.

Eventually the novelty faded and other neighbors decided to skip over the popular reluctance to go with the new technology ("I'll wait until it's perfected") and the Moochers returned to their hives. But it made such an impact on me that I never forgot the date of the delivery, January 29, 1959; it seemed so epochal.

Then, as the decades passed, as swiftly as pages falling from a wall calendar in a 1940s melodrama, media innovations came and sparked and died or transformed. There was the remote control, a gimmick introduced by Zenith, that afforded us the freedom to sit on our duffs to change the channels. Then came cable TV (which most entitled Americans resisted), the Sony walkman, the Sony watchman, 8-tracks players, audio cassettes, VCRs, DVDs, TIVO, DVRs, computers, the Internet, cell phones, Ipods, Blue Tooth and Blue Ray. Whew. Not for any of these inventions was I the pioneer, as when I was a child.

So, a half century (help!) later, we are watching the proliferation of the newest TV technology, Hi Def TV, now beginning to saturate all the homes in the world, now that digital TV is taking over, analog signals are about to vanish, and the prices of the new devices are trending down, along with the economy. And I find that just as I got inured to color TV and could not appreciate black-and-white any more, I find viewing nm picture that is not 1080 lines is like looking through blurry lenses. And the innovations keep coming--a 3D screen was previewed in a recent technology show, and, if viewers can tolerate the thought of donning those silly polarized glasses, should become another common appliance some time in the next decade.

And it better be very special, because TV itself, like so many other 20th century media phenomena, is a threatened species.