Modern technology, even if it wasn’t called that back in the fifties, came slowly into my house. My father saw no need for it. It wasn’t until January 1952, during my junior year in high school, that we acquired our own telephone! My father had no reason to communicate with anyone, except for an emergency, when he would ask Mrs. Andrews if he could use her phone.
There were, however, telephones available when we lived with his family “up-the-hill” or on my grandmother’s farm. Actually, the telephone on the farm had been of modest entertainment value for me. We had a party-line. Our phone was the classic “ring-two” variety. The entertainment value, of course, came from picking up the receiver, after hearing a “non-ring-two,” and quietly listening, making sure not to breathe loud enough to be heard by the true callers.
The telephone in our new residence in town had a semi-private line with Mrs. Andrews. I never listened to her calls! Our number, 1-9758, later OLympic 2-9758, was listed under my mother’s name, since my father still did not really want to be identified as owning one. I enjoyed calling others in my classes about homework assignments.
Television, the other major technology of the fifties, had been discovered by our relatives several years before my father found it. Occasionally, we would visit my uncles’ families (either Uncle Bill Moransky or Uncle Frank Borecki) and spend the evening watching TV with them.
However, the first television I saw, in person, was in the home of a professor at Kent State University when several of us high school sophomores went to the regional biology exams there. We stayed overnight and were housed by a faculty member who owned a two-square-inch television set! He invited us to watch it with his family. A flat magnifying glass was mounted in front of the tiny screen to allow all of us clustered nearby, very nearby, to view what was being telecast in fuzzy black and white images.
Development was rapid. My relatives all purchased stand-alone television sets with twelve-square-inch screens. We did not need to cluster as closely around the large piece of furniture housing the cathode ray tube and its fleet of tungsten tubes. It was not a great distance to walk from the chair to the set in order to change the channels receiving the signals from the local ABC, CBS or NBC stations. On the other hand, it was not easy for someone to twist the antenna to the correct position to minimize the fuzziness. Sometimes, one of the viewers would need to stand there and be part of the bunny ears.
My father finally allowed a TV set to enter our house during my senior year in high school. Our set was guarded by a ceramic black panther, crouched on top of the set, who concealed a dim light bulb, so we did not need to view the grey, washed-out images in complete darkness. In the late afternoons, my father watched baseball games, while he listened to the radio broadcast of what was being said about the plays he was viewing. Occasionally he might watch one game while listening to the radio broadcast of a different one.
My own tastes ran to such productions as: Lux Video Theatre, The Colgate Comedy Hour, Truth or Consequences, Red Skelton Show, Dragnet and Our Miss Brooks. I often stayed awake until the Indian chief appeared following the National Anthem. In the early years, his profile was seen about 10:00 p.m.; somewhat later, he arrived near midnight.
The third, new technology also came during my senior year, the window air-conditioner. The window frame in our dining room no longer housed a supplemental winter cooler for our icebox, which had been replaced by the year-round Frigidaire. Thus, the window-opening could now be used for the box that kept the downstairs of our house cool during the summer. On hot, humid nights in Ohio I had the choice of a damp breeze from an open window, while lying on a soft bed in my room, or a colder blast, while attempting to sleep on the hard floor downstairs. I also had to learn to doze off listening to the hum of the fan for the air-conditioner, a more consistent sound than that of an oscillating fan located on the second-floor landing that was intended to cool both bedrooms. Yes, modern technology gave me new options. I loved it.