Cable TV Comes to South Philly

Young people today will never remember a time when they didn’t have a multitude of channels with nothing to watch. Bruce Springsteen sang in the early 90s about having fifty-seven channels with nothing on. Today it’s well over a hundred and still, it seems that there's not much to watch. Murder has become entertainment via shows like Dateline NBC, 48 Hours and 20/20. Half-hour informercials abound for things like air fryers and other kitchen gadgets that promise to be the last you'll ever need. Yet still, the manufacturers keep developing new machines. I can remember years ago all the health infomercials, including colon cleanses and books with remedies that they don't want you to know about.  And you wonder why your wallet's lighter after the shows are over?

Back in the mid-’70s, the area west of Broad Street and I believe above Oregon was the test area for cable TV. No one else had it in the city, not Southwest, Northeast, not even parts of South Philly, including all of east of Broad Street. We were the lucky ones. Woo-hoo! So we felt we had bragging rights, though today, I'd say we're getting robbed.

What we had back then would probably be laughed off by today’s standards. There was no Smithsonian Network, StartTV, History, or CNN (gasp!) at the time. We basically had a few New York channels (WOR channel 9 and WPIX channel 11) and a few odd things in between. There was 24-hour cable news, but it was just text on-screen, provided by Reuters. It's how I found out that Elvis died. If you were one of the homes having it at the time, you’ll remember your “remote” was as big as a cigar box, with 15 buttons for channels and a rocker switch to go from the top tier to the bottom. Plus it had a tuning wheel to fine-tune your picture. And a 100-foot cord so you could change channels in the kitchen while getting it tangled on your trip to the fridge and back. It was really primitive: no voice remote, you still had to actually turn on the TV, but it worked for us. Telesystems was the company running the show at the time. It gave way to Greater Media, which was swallowed up later by Comcast, but I think there was another company that was somewhere between the last two. So much for the four franchises that the city was supposed to have. Comcast has just about everything wrapped up, or did until Verizon launched FiOS. Competition is a wonderful thing.

We got cable TV installed on the same day we got our first color TV back in the mid-70’s. We were always outside doing something, but not that day. We stayed inside and stayed glued to the tube. It was a big event for us. The cartoons were in color! That crazy weather guy in NY kept us laughing. Then, like everything else, we got bored of it and life returned to normal shortly afterward. At least the snow was gonesince we didn't need an antenna.

Not long after we got cable, HBO became available. It was there where we first heard obscenities coming off the tube, much to my mom’s chagrin. It was a movie called Law & Disorder with Carrol O’Connor and Ernest Borgnine on a Sunday evening. Mom was livid, threatening to get rid of HBO if that was what they were going to show. Dad didn’t care much about it, so he wanted to keep it. Dad won, or so some would say. I'm glad she wasn't home when we first saw Taxi Driver. My kind, friendly mother would have taken a torch to the whole thing and said goodbye to Travis Bickle! My thoughts today is that there’s not a need for profanity on TV or in movies. That’s a moral argument and my choice, but this is a blog about memories so we’ll not go there.

Kids, if you ever find yourself bored with TV, think of this…my earliest memories of TV was an old black & white Admiral TV with a tuning knob (?) – no remote controls (well my dad had one. He told us to change the channel, and we did). And we had only three channels (KYW 3; WFIL 6 – now WPVI, and public television, WHYY Channel 12). Our set didn’t even get CBS, which was Channel 10 at the time. It wasn’t until 1969 or 1970 that we got a Sears Silvertone console set that had – wonder of wonders – UHF channels! We finally had a selection of shows that we only heard of before.

That wouldn’t cut it for folks today, but it worked for us. Ah, simpler times!

AND YOU MAY REMEMBER…

   ... Back when a network's name reflected it's programming. History showed only historical programming, TLC was The Learning Channel without Dr. Pimple Popper, and AMC was American Movie Classics with old classic movies that my grandmother loved. Now it's anything goes.
   ... Doctor Shock’s horror movies on Saturday nights on channel 17. Who can forget his kid, Bubbles? Or Booth's Soda, his main sponsor?

   ... Mr. Gagliardi, my and many other young men's English teacher from Neumann hosting Cable Bingo.

  ... The Flyers channel after they won their first Stanley Cup. Neighborhood guys found you could get it free instead of paying for it by simply pressing two buttons on the remote at the same time. It morphed later into PRISM (Philadelphia Regional In-Home Sports and Movies), and was the first 24-hor station that I can remember.


... When stations signed off for the night with the national anthem.

... Test patterns that occupied the screen from signoff until around 6 AM when the channels signed on again. And then-obscure shows like Farm Report that you found on at 6:00 A.M. if you had to get up early for detention.

   ...And everyone's favorite UHF station at the time, Channel 48, WKBS, Wilmington/Philadelphia. Home of tons of toons and the Little Rascals by day, and Mary Hartmann and Fernwood/America Tonight and Night Gallery in the late evening. Channels 17 and 29 were alright, but  48 blew them out of the water. I'd say "off the airwaves", but the first two are still around while 48 is long-gone.