Canyon TV

I remember when we got our first TV in the early ‘60’s from Guy & Cousin Carol when they moved to California and beyond. I thought we were rich! We got to watch westerns and Mama watched Lawrence Welk.

My Guest Author, my Daddy, remembers his first TV too.

In 1935 I became addicted to outdoor TV shows that we had in the mountains. The Sweet Grass Canyon TV was especially great to watch in July afternoons when the wind whispering in the big fir trees and bees buzzing in the flower garden made a better song than the radio. 

That radio was an indoor feature which spoke from a two-foot horn mounted on the log wall to the left of the kitchen cupboard. The Sweet Grass Canyon TV was outdoors, and it was free. It had top rated programs both day and night. The best place to watch it was from the grassy hillside back of the chicken house. There the hill flattened out to make a bed for deer, or cattle, or boys or girls. In the warm afternoon it became a green sofa where a child could lay down and view the Sweet Grass Canyon TV.

The adults in the log house near the foot of the hill had to be content with a static challenged radio while the children were watching the white puffy clouds become horses, or bears, or elephants, or houses and cathedrals. You never knew what you would see next. The programs changed continuously. 

If you thought that watching TV didn’t happen until the 1940’s, you could think again.  It had been set up ages before. It even had sound. Some days you could hear the echoes of a whisper saying, “This is very good.”

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