When Television Came to Malvern
By George Evans Taylor, Jr.
As published 2001 in the Heritage
I was born and raised in Malvern, Arkansas and lived there until September 1957. Television came to the Malvern area about 1951. At that time I was living on the Old Military Road in the Cooper community with my wife Betty Sue (Tillery).
Our first TV was a used fourteen inch console model which I bought about two weeks before the first area station went on the air. I bought it from Murl Hobbs who had just moved back home from an area where there was a TV station. I paid him about $30 for the set. I had the set checked by a man from Texas who had just opened a TV Service shop on South Main St in Kelly Clardy's place. The serviceman said the set was ready to use. I paid him, carried the set home and connected it for future use.
I didn't know how to operate the used set I had bought and it came with no instructions. I bought an Audels Manual to show how to operate and adjust a TV set.
KATV -TV, channel 11, in Pine Bluff was the first area station to go on the air (this station, I am told, is now in Little Rock). KARK-TV, channel 4, in Little Rock and Kxxx-TV, channel 7, in Little Rock went on the air shortly thereafter.
All sets back then would receive only twelve channels, 2 thru 13. These were VHF frequencies and are still in use today. There were no remote controls, even to change the channel. The set had several knobs and small adjustments. As it "warmed up" adjustments had to be made. All TVs would roll up and down at times, also "pull" horizontally. It kept a person busy just keeping a steady picture, there were no couch potatoes then!
Our console TV had large electron tubes that were wired like Christmas tree lights, if one burned out then all would go out. One Saturday afternoon a 25 volt tube burned out and I had no exact replacement. I wired another 25 volt tube (with same milliampere requirement) in the series string to keep the rest of the tubes on. Then I wired up a tube just like the defective one except it had a 6 volt filament. I took my car battery (all were 6 volt then), set it on the floor behind the TV set in the corner, and used it to heat the tube filament so everyone could see TV that night! I am sure I had to jump start my old Ford the next day!
The TV stations would go on the air about mid-morning with a test pattern, the classic "Indian Head Test Pattern". For many months programming began in mid afternoon and ended at 9 or 10 PM.
Everything was in black and white, including the Indian, but adjustments were made to obtain various shades of gray. This is where the Indian's head dress feathers came into play, they were used to adjust the shades of gray. People would sit in my small living room and watch that Indian for hours waiting for the program to come on!
I had been watching the "Indian Head Test Pattern" and happened to be watching when programming first came on. Lo and behold, a live picture on TV! In my living room! There were fourteen people at my house when the station came on the air.
Every Saturday evening for a period of time we had company to watch TV, it being the only set in the community. Some new viewers thought that if we could see the people on screen then they must be able to see us! Back then everything on TV was live. Also there was no published schedule.
Wife Betty and I would pop a lot of popcorn to serve our guests. As time went by other people bought sets of their own and we were again left to ourselves.
Most programs were westerns, comedy, wrestling and cartoons. While westerns were showing, many badmen and Indians were killed on screen. A visiting viewer once asked if I had to empty the picture tube every so often!
Each afternoon there was a serial (segmented/continued program) to keep you coming back to watch, as in the movie theatre. My dad (George Evans Taylor) would find excuses to be at my house about the time that some animal adventure would be on. He had to see what was happening as he was a hunter and also loved animals. I recall a specific time that the serial ended just as a tiger jumped from a ledge to land on a man. Dad was there the next afternoon to see if the man survived! Sometimes my mom (Gladys Aline (Ennis) Taylor) would come down to watch for a while. She enjoyed it but didn't get too excited.
We would sometimes bring my wife's parents (Walter Scott Tillery, Mamie Lee (Black) Tillery) out to watch TV with us. I don't remember what Walter liked but Mamie just had to watch that wrestling. She would really get with it!
The first commerical I remember seeing was of a moving company in Pine Bluff, it showed the men wearing white gloves to handle the furniture!
The channel selector knob turned the electro-mechanical turret tuner to change the channels. These components gave much trouble because of the mechanical wear. Tuner spray helped but replacement was the only lasting solution. Sometimes just the replacement of a turret segment for a particular channel would take care of the problem.
When cars drove by, especially Fords, there were white streaks across the picture. We found that if we twisted the flat 300 Ohm lead-in a turn for each foot of length it would tend to null out some of the interference. And I drove a Ford!
Problems with the old TV sets were tubes burning out/getting weak (typically each set contained twenty-one tubes), picture tubes (isolators and/or boosters were used to keep from replacing the expensive tube), power resistors would burn open, adjustments of all sorts, power supplies, capacitors, etc. Heat generated within the set was it's biggest enemy. One had to be very careful when working on these sets as there were lethal voltages/currents present.
I took Radio-Television repair correspondence courses along with courses on Servicing Appliances. These courses were thru the mail from NRI, The National Radio Institute.
I had a shop in my back yard at 905 Lowden Street in North Malvern until I moved to Alabama in 1957. I made enough money in my shop to pay for my courses, buy new test equipment, buy parts and put a little in my pocket. I still have a workable tube tester I bought back then! Mostly it was a grand experience that led me to an exciting new vocation (Electrical Engineering)! I worked in my shop each morning then, along with my wife Betty, I worked at the International Shoe Company's local textile mill on the evening shift. I still have a caddy full of radio and TV tubes, some "new", some used. Maybe I worked on your set!
I worked, when he needed me, for my second cousin, Faye Jones. He had a small business on West Page Ave across from the 555 Wrecker Service. The name of the business was Jones Furniture, they sold TV sets and I would deliver and install them, and install an antenna.
Antenna masts were bought in ten foot sections and fastened to the edge of the house, some used guy wires for extra support. Some people used a 21 foot section of 1/2" pipe for a mast.
Bought antennas were fairly expensive so I made several antennas from old junk yard car gas lines. I got these free at Ray Hobb's Garage near Rockport. I utilized the Yagi design from the Audels Manual I had bought.
Wind would sometimes turn the antenna, ghosts would then be on the screen because it was not pointed correctly. Some people installed rotors to remotely turn the antenna to the direction of the desired station. Most just went outside and turned the antenna support pipe. Some people used two antennas, one pointing toward Pine Bluff and one toward Little Rock. They were connected together with a matching transformer. With this set-up no rotor nor turning was required.
With a 75 ft tower and a good TV set you could receive stations from Texarkana, Texas and Memphis, Tennessee. Some Malvernites were doing this prior to the area stations coming on the air. The pictures were snowey but viewable.
At one time you could drive thru Malvern and see a TV antenna at nearly every house, a kind of badge of the TV viewing fraternity. From a high vantage point the town looked like a large porcupine!
The second TV set we bought was a small table top unit. I bought it new from Carl Spence at the Western Auto Supply store on the corner of Main Street and Page Avenue (Highway 67) on the SW corner. You could find anything you needed at the Spence boys' store!
Sometime later you could buy a set top signal booster, then they made amplifiers to be mounted at the antenna and the power supply at the set. These units were helpful in getting a better picture, but not as much as you might think. About 1956 you could buy a UHF converter to enable one to see the new UHF stations going on the air. It converted the Ultra High Frequencies to Very High Frequency channel 3 or 4. You set the TV tuner to channel 3 or 4 and changed UHF stations with the converter knob!
In today's world it is hard to envision living without TV. We have available to us hundreds of channels of every known subject. All in living color! We are connected to a cable system or satellite dish in stead of an outside antenna. There are now few outside antennas in use excepting the small dishes. We have VCRs. We have camcorders. We have electronic games. We have computers. We can "order-up" movies. We have digital systems. We have one inch size TVs, we have forty-five inch TVs. We can watch TV from most any place we go. What did the young people, and others, do with the time that they now use watching TV? I could tell you about that but it is another story!
In the half century since the happenings above, many things in the world of electronics have come to the market. All because of a grain of sand (silicon)! All from God's earth! Everything that man possesses comes from the earth, sky or oceans. Even his automobiles, think about it!
Be ever mindful of what God is allowing you to use while walking his earth! Take care of it, it will belong to someone else when you are gone.
Written on January 1st, 2001 by:
George Evans Taylor, Jr.
209 Lakeshore Drive
Muscle Shoals, Alabama 35661-1029
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