Remember the coal man delivering the coal to the basement chute and dad shoveling coal into the furnace? Should we get the hard coal which was more expensive, gave more heat, and lasted longer or the soft coal which was cheaper, always the question.
Dad built the first TV in our neighborhood. B&W of course. I helped in the last stages of tuning it, he was tuning a pot behind the set and I was watching to tell him when the picture was clear. He kept saying, “How’s that?” and when I said nothing, he’s make another adjustment. At one point. I yelled, “Stop! There’s a good picture with a monkey eating a banana in a palm tree in color”. I didn’t know that it was supposed to be B&W. He laughed and said, “Very funny, son”.
Then he turned the pot again and there was Abbot an Costello doing a routine, all thoughts of what I had seen were forgotten ... until 65 years later when I read in Popular Science or Scientific American that way back then Johnson & Johnson had been experimenting with broadcasting color over B&W sets. The scene they were broadcasting featured the above description. The Johnson & Johnson lab was a mile from our home. I was not crazy and saw something probably no one alive saw outside of Johnson & Johnson.
I shoveled coal into the furnace,shook down the ashes,shoveled them into a metal ash can,and turned the dampers. Dreadful.
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