Approaching HDTV, over

Lots of circles closing around here. One last week, and now another one. I like circles closing, but when they start coming fast like this, there is the dark breath of a suggestion of an end being nigh. When the One Great Circle starts to close . . . well, never mind. Is it too late to get some new circles started?

This circle started in 1952, when word came that Abilene, Texas, my hometown, was going to have its own television station going on the air in 1953. This was hysterically good news to a nine-year-old who had already successfully badgered his elders into placing a 21-inch Zenith, complete with ChannelMaster antenna, in a corner of the living room even though the nearest stations were in Dallas, 160 miles away. It was truly miraculous. I could bring in ghostly images from KRLD and WFAA and faint snatches of voice escaping the static. Otherwise the TV was a good vase holder, and of course an easy way to shut me up for hours at a time.

In 1952, television was novel technology. The radio, you turned it on, you turned it off. The television, you had to know how to operate it, requiring a melding of the mind with strange new forces inside the TV that were swayed by an array of controls. I can honestly say, in 2008, that television in 1952-53 was a television from another planet.

Here’s how you changed the channel. First you had to physically know where the station transmitter was from your house. For me, Channel 9 was south, Channel 12 was west. Say I’m watching 9 and want to watch 12. I have two options. I can rotate the ChannelMaster dial from S to W and run madly outside and watch the antenna swing around. Or I can click the TV dial from 9 to 12, then rotate the ChannelMaster and shriek with delight as the 12 picture slowly emerges out of the driving snow. My grandmother would take this in with the clearest expression I have ever seen of someone in a world coming to something that was totally devoid of a lick of sense.

Then you had to adjust the Vertical Hold, the Horizontal Hold, and the Fine Tune Knob, and quite possibly the ChannelMaster some more until the 12 picture yielded to these demands and centered itself quietly more or less in the center of the screen. Half an hour later – or maybe just 15 minutes – a lot of shows in 1953 were only 15 minutes long – to flip back to Channel 9, you repeated the process.

Television eventually became as simple as a radio to use, and all through the 1980s and ‘90s I would brag to young remote-wielding couch potatoes how making a television picture come in took one part boy, one part God and one part Charles Lindbergh. Yesterday the circle closed. Karen wondered if we shouldn’t investigate HDTVs. It was an offer a 65-year-old boy couldn’t refuse.

Quickly I found that television has entered a new world. The last TV we bought, we went to the store, decided which was the best picture, took it home, plugged it in, turned it on. It has been that way for 35 years. Now it is 1953 again. I am reading about HDTV online and it is all if, and, and but. Compared to this, the 1952 Zenith really was black and white.