Let’s visit TV’s good(?) old days

(This is the start of a book, “TV, and How It Got That Way.” It will emerge here, one chapter at a time.)
To see how far TV has come, let’s step back a bit.
We’ll go to 1952 in Clintonville, a Wisconsin town of 4,600, known for big, tough trucks and (back then) big, tough football players.
I’m in the living room with my sister, our parents, a grandmother and a grandfather. Stationed a reasonable distance from the TV set, we are watching … well, a man playing records.
The man says what record he’s playing and starts it. Sometimes, the camera shows the record going around; sometimes it shows the man watching the record go around.
When I recall this, people sometimes ask: “Why were you watching?”
The answer is simple enough: Because it was on TV. And it was happening live. And it was in our living room.
And why didn’t we switch the channel? Mainly because there was nothing to switch to. We could only get one station (WBAY in Green Bay), but if there were others in our part of the world, they would have similar shows.
By 1952, TV had already found glimmers of greatness. It had “I Love Lucy,” Sid Caesar, Jackie Gleason and live dramas. Ed Sullivan was there, introducing us to marvels we would have never known, including Broadway stars and African-American entertainers.
But those were the high points. That year, prime time was also giving us “Youth on the March,” “Johns Hopkins Science Review,””Balance Your Budget” and lots of men fighting. Each week, there were three boxing shows and two wrestling ones, plus “Famous Fights” and “Greatest Fights.”
And that was primetime; at first, networks ignored the rest. “Today” arrived in 1952, “Tonight” in ‘54; soap operas were only 15 minutes long until 1956.
That left vast stretches when stations went off the air or made-do.
In big cities, they could figure out something. In 1949, a Los Angeles station filled its daytime with a talk-and-music show co-hosted by a DJ and newcomer Betty White. The show kept growing.
“’Hollywood on Television’ was now on the air 33 hours a week …. It was us or the test pattern,” White wrote in “Here We Go Again” (Scribner, 1995).
Even commercials were live and (mostly) done by the hosts, she wrote. “Our all-time record for a single day eventually stood at 58 live commercials.”
This makeshift show was for the elite, big-city market. Now imagine what was left for the rest of us.
Some stations filled the holes with whatever was free. “Industry on Parade” simply showed industrial films.
Some had some old movies. And some had men playing records. Hey, it was happening live … and it came right to our living room in Clintonville.