The Word - Vol 95

 Hundreds of Channels and Nothing on!

I paid a visit to Costco the other day and was blown away by the selection of television sets. Well, maybe not the number of TV’s but the size!  There was a TV there with a 100-inch screen! You would need to have a giant family room for a set that size. Which reminded me of the first television set I ever saw.

But before TV, at our house in the 1950s, we would gather around a radio that was big enough to be considered part of the living room furniture. It was a wooden framed set that stood about 4 feet high. Saturday nights were spent listening to Hockey Night in Canada on that big old radio. Dad was a Detroit Red Wings fan, and just as big a fan of Mr. Hockey, Gordie Howe. So, whenever the Red Wings were playing the Toronto Maple Leafs or the Montreal Canadiens, Dad was right beside the radio, listening to the call. I was listening too, but most Saturday nights I was lying on the floor reading the Star Weekly. Do you remember the Star Weekly? It was a large glossy magazine that had feature articles, recipes, sports news, colour comics and always had a full page devoted to a picture of sports heroes from hockey, baseball and boxing. At its peak in the early 1960’s the magazine averaged 108 pages, and sold over one million copies a week. That was our entertainment. It was a simple time back then. But then something magical took place. We were introduced to television! In the early days of TV, people thought that it was just radio with pictures, but it quickly became more than that! 

In the mid to late 50’s our neighbours, the Hoskins, were the only family on the block, to own a television set! Hard to believe when today almost every household has one, and most homes have more than one, some complete with a theatre room and a screen as big as the wall.


The Hoskins were very generous neighbours and opened their home to all the Moms, Dads and kids in the neighbourhood every Friday night, because Friday was the night for “Gillette’s Cavalcade of Sports.” Friday night at the fights. I think on Friday nights the Moms gathered in the dining room or kitchen, at least my Mom would have, she wasn’t much of a boxing fan. (I’ve included a link to YouTube that features one of the Friday Night Fights, the quality isn’t great, but you get to sing along to the “Look Sharp, Feel Sharp” Gillette razor blade song!)   

Thinking back on those nights, the craziest thing was that all the Dads would light up cigars while watching the boxing matches. Nothing out of the ordinary here, just half a dozen men sitting around the living room smoking cigars. I can only imagine what the drapes, upholstery and carpeting must have smelled like. Back in those days, it was perfectly acceptable to smoke inside the house. Cigars, cigarettes, pipes, and you could be sure that every table had an ashtray, and even some rooms had standing ashtrays that stood on a pedestal 3 feet tall. 

Television was very special in those days and a few years later, we finally got a TV of our own. Nothing fancy, but who needed something fancy when the picture was black and white and you only had 2 or 3 channels to choose from. Most TVs had to have an aerial device that sat on top of the set, known as rabbit ears, and if you placed some tin foil on top of the ears you could sometimes enhance the reception. For a few more bucks you could have an antenna fastened to the roof of your house to pull in stations from Seattle! 

Now it’s 100-inch screens pulling in more channels than you have time in the day or night to watch. What’s the old song from Bruce Springsteen, 57 channels and nothing on? You’ll have to change the title of that song Bruce, now it’s hundreds and hundreds of channels, and still nothing on.

Till next week…pass the popcorn! 
- Wayne

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