Growing Up With Tv

Your May/June issue brought back many sweet memories of television in the 1950s. I recall well seeing my first TV show, on June 19, 1946. It was that second Joe Louis-Billy Conn worldchampionship fight described in the article, and I saw it in Rockville, Connecticut, more than a hundred miles from the New York City station televising it. The owner of our local radio store had built his own television receivers out of World War II surplus parts. He installed his sets in a shack high on one of Rockville’s many hills, with a tall antenna tower. On the night of the fight he invited many of his customers to the shack. My father brought me to see the event. We watched the fight on three surplus radar screens. Two had a blue cast; the other was bright orange. It was a marvelous fight. Even though Louis was nearing the end of his career, he was still exciting to watch.

To me TV was the first postwar wonder.