Stereos and TVs in the 1970's

I guess the first TV I remember was a box set on top of four chrome legs.  This black and white deal had a fine walnut cabinet on all sides except the back, where there was a fiber board backing to allow the TV repairmen easy access to the tubes when they came to our house to fix it.  The TV had two dials, one for channel and one for volume. The channel dial clicked into one of 13 channels but also had a fine tuning dial that you could use if your antenna was not pointed the right way.

We got up to thirteen channels on that TV, but there were only two channels near enough to pick up, NBC and CBS.  Our neighbors had a TV that had a clicker with two tuning forks inside it.  One click on the tuning fork and the TV would advance one channel, all the way up to thirteen and back to 2.  The other clicker would turn up the volume or turn it down.  Those people were the first ones to install a TV antenna on a tower behind their house, and the antenna had a little motor on it that they could use to turn the antenna to the best direction for different channels.  The control for the TV antenna was on top of the TV cabinet.

The next TV I remember was a little black and white portable job that my parents bought for their bedroom so that they could watch shows they liked.  Us kids had pretty much taken over downstairs, so the 14 inch red and white plastic portable was perfect for watching Johnny Carson, or late night drama shows that came on after the kids were in bed.

This was the TV I watched the coverage of the JFK assassination on.  I will never forget my mother telling me I was too feverish to go to school that day.  I stayed home and at about a quarter of two she came and put me in the bedroom and set me on Dad's bed and said "Sit here and watch this"  Then she left and I sat there thinking that I did not know the President's name was Kennedy.  I thought it was something else.

Anyway, that's my alibi.

After awhile we got a little portable color TV.  This thing had a fake wood grain plastic case and was twice as big as the red plastic TV had been, and more than twice as heavy.  In second grade one of the girls had told us about what it was like to watch Wizard of Oz on a color TV, but most of us didn't believe it.  Before I started high school my parents bought a 'console' sized color TV complete with fine wood cabinetry and upholstered speaker coverings.

Grandma had a green and white plastic covered black and white TV that was mounted on a wire frame dolly.  This TV was so portable that she kept it in the closet except for those special occasions when she chose to watch TV, like coverage of Gemini space launches or the funeral of Sir Winston Churchill. That was the TV I used in college.

Stereos is a different matter.  The first one I remember was custom ordered by my Dad ordered around 1960.  I think he was spoiled by the excellent sound produced by pre-war German radios that he listened to when he was in the war.  When the embargo on German electronics ended in the 1950's he ordered the first good one he could afford, a Fischer, with a Girard turntable and Koss headphones.  Most records were still produced in what they called monaural, or mono, and that stereo still had  a setting for playing 78 RPM records which was the standard speed before the war.

After the Beatles came out they bought us kids a little portable 45 record player.  This little box came with detachable speakers that hooked onto the side of the record player with latches.  The wire for the speakers you just scrunched up inside a little hole that was built into the speaker, and you could place the speakers about 8 feet apart, but it sounded better if they were only about 4 feet apart.

One of my brothers got a better record player with a record changer and some bigger speakers which was cool because you could play LPs or Long Playing records on it, and the sound was noticeably better than the little box sized record player.  But that box sized job was the first time I heard stereo in Beatle records like Help, and I Should Have Known Better.  Let me tell you that was an eye opening experience and when Mom and Dad weren't home we took those records downstairs and played them on the good Fischer stereo and used the headphones too.

But this experience was nothing compared to the summer that my older brother came home from college for summer, bringing his Marantz amplifier, Bose speakers and AudioTechnica turntable.  I sat in his room while he was at work and turned up the Rolling Stones Jumping Jack Flash and it was like nothing else when I pushed the button for loudness and felt the heat of the speakers on the skin of my face.

In those days people had strong feelings about which speakers were the best, and who made the most well balanced turntable, but for a while I think everyone agreed that the Marantz amplifier with the stainless steel cabinet was the best thing you could get for your money.  You could go to parties and be invited into peoples houses, and go over to see what kind of stereo they had, and a lot of the time you would see that silver metal colored Marantz sitting right there at the center of things.  You could smile and point at it and the owner would just smile back and say "I know"

K98-LGR