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Shannon’s Broadcast by Shannon Huniwell |
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“They’ve got this new thing now called listening to the radio,” my dad would joke whenever I whined about the limited capabilities of our old TV. It was an ancient black & white Zenith that literally needed kick starting. Actually, it wasn’t even really a Zenith, but rather an embarrassing generic rectangle wearing a Sears and Roebuck label. The Sears salesman is quoted as having told father that the catalog store’s low-priced products were secretly made by major brands “like, you know, maybe Zenith or some other famous name.” Seems to me that one of its tired old tubes did have a “Z” stenciled around the middle. There’s a slight chance that might have denoted Zenith, but certainly didn’t designate zero warm-up time! We used to laugh about having to turn it on before noon on Wednesday if we wanted to watch the Friday night movie. Worst of all, though, the darn thing was only equipped to get VHF (Channels 2 through 13) stations. That worked okay in the metropolitan New York area where all the networks and several independents operated “Vees,” but when we moved to Weatogue, Connecticut, not long after my 10th birthday, NBC programs there were conspicuously absent from its huge round click-tuning dial.
A kid in my class told me the Peacock’s shows
like Little House on the Prairie arrived over New Britain’s WHNB-TV on
Channel 30 (now WVIT-TV and coincidentally across the road from Sears), an
incredibly high channel number to this ancient faux-Zenith-owning family.
Fortunately, Mr. Smuckler, my know-it-all but helpful science teacher,
overheard the recommendation and suggested the purchase of a UHF converter
for our antediluvian set. Such a device was new to me, too, so Mr.
Smuckler seized the opportunity to explain—via intricate blackboard
diagrams—how this converter allowed VHF-only televisions to tune
ultra-high frequencies (Channels 14 to 83), which the FCC had assigned to
the broadcast television spectrum in 1952 in order to relieve the shortage
of available TV allocations. |
The call letters of this early “U” stood for Greater Lehigh (Pennsylvania) Valley. WGLV-TV offered local, ABC, and DuMont programming on Channel 57 and, according to this 1955 informational flyer, operated in a market where 45 percent of the television homes in its coverage area had some UHF-TV conversion equipment. It was owned by the Easton Express newspaper, so received hefty cross-promotion in a medium that few independent “U”s enjoyed. It still didn’t generate sufficient viewership to keep the paper from suspending video operation. |
