Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
I started at $1.15 per hour in my first non-lawn mowing or ag-related job in the summer of 1972, working for Cliff Stickney at the Wind River Elementary School in Pavillion. The following summer I had a huge raise, getting $2.10.
I saved most of the money that second summer, but in August, I drove to Riverton, dropped into Coast to Coast, and bought a big 5×8 foot television antenna. My dad had a joint and half of drill stem. We connected the antenna to it and I attached it to the second floor of the house on the southwest corner.
The only TV station we were able to get was KWRB, Channel 10 out of Thermopolis. It was no box of chocolates. It operated most of the time from 6 am to 10 pm, but sometimes shut down early if the engineer had a dinner date or maybe a late start to a softball game in the summer.
It was an NBC affiliate, and while I watched the Miami Dolphins beat the Kansas City Chiefs in a Christmas Day playoff game in 1971, most of the time it was just a single broadcast of the Broncos on Sunday afternoons.
That 82-minute-long, double-overtime game is a great memory, especially viewing it on a snowy screen.
Snowy screens don’t exist today. Either they’re crystal clear or they pixelated, stalled and frozen, but they’re never snowy and you don’t ever have to adjust the vertical or horizontal hold.
Back to the antenna project with Dad. We wanted to watch Monday Night Football. KTWO in distant Casper, 145 miles away, carried Howard Cosell and Dandy Don, but it was just snow on Channel 2 at the farm.
With the antenna in place, and a primitive signal booster attached to the cable we were able to get KTWO. It was never consistent. The distance, weather, birds, meteors, rotation of the earth, gamma radiation, Area 51, reverse Coriolis Effect, or maybe the wind of Casper Mountain created a challenge.
We had a good signal after dark, but in the twilight hours, it was sketchy at best. We tuned the antenna the old way. We opened the door to the west, Dad stood halfway between the door and the TV, and I turned the antenna with a 24-inch pipe wrench.
“A little more,” he’d say. “No, too far, back it up.”
After a couple of turns, we had the best picture we could hope for. We repeated the process sometimes a dozen times in watching a complete ballgame.
We get our TV online, through Sling TV. It works on any Internet-connected device and costs about $70 a month. There still isn’t much to watch. Sue is a constant whirl of motion around the house with endless projects and tasks to complete, and I like to write in the early morning hours, edit in the early evening, and read from around 8 to 11 pm each day. In between its other jobs.
Still, we pay for it and when the granddaughters are around, Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Disney + fill the screen.
In North Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, east of Pittsburg where Jayne and Norah watch those same premium services, there isn’t any cable going into their parent’s home.
Our son-in-law Adam has a remote-controlled, digital antenna above their chimney and at last count, they receive 120 over-the-air digital channels.
That’s a lot of television channels, though many of them are repetitive.
As a kid, in the era of analog television signals, Adam had a bank of four huge color TVs in his basement bedroom. He had three of them attached to antennas pointed in different directions. He was able to receive Steeler games from a local channel, Washington Redskins from a West Virginia station, and Philadelphia Eagles games from farther east in Pennsylvania. The fourth set was for Sega, Atari, and Nintendo.
It was a low-tech analog solution far removed from the “special price” YouTube now offers for NFL Sunday Ticket at $479. No thanks.
My father-in-law Sig Hahn was an antenna guru. He had an 80-foot-tall tower in his backyard, complete with guy wires and a giant rotating antenna at the top. With a tube-style amplifier in his basement workroom, he was able to get Denver, Rapid City, Cheyenne, and Casper stations, plus a wide range of Sand Hills stations similar to KWRB out of Nebraska. He had the most channels available in Lusk, Wyoming even after a limited cable TV company arrived in the 1970s.
Cable now dominates the market, at an exponential increase in pricing. They prey on the elderly who didn’t even have TV as kids, but as young adults used rabbit ears and bits of folded tinfoil to bring in local stations. Gradually they moved to limited cable, then the mushrooming digital world.
I know a few elderly folks who dish out $260 or more a month for TV, Internet, and landline phone service. Once again, no thanks.
Entertainment has always been pricey. It’s something we don’t have to have, but that has grown into a necessity.
The glowing flickering of a campfire, or later a family hearth was replaced in the late 1940s and early 50s by the electrical glow of a black and white TV set.
We were late in getting a color TV. My parents purchased a cabinet-style Zenith in 1965.
I talked them into buying an old metal TV from a neighbor for $5 a year later. They let me put it in my bedroom.
The metal box was about 20x20x20 inches, with VHF and UHF setscrews in the back. I connected the rabbit ears and that weird round UHF antenna and was able to pick up several dozen stations.
It had a plastic dial on the top for channels 2-13 that clicked when you turned it, and a spot to set it for UHF. The UHF dial moved from 14 to 83, but didn’t click, you had to carefully dial in those stations.
We lived north of San Franciso near Travis Air Force Base. When I messed around with the TV I was sometimes able to pick up Morse code, and occasionally hear Air Force pilots approaching Travis.
What came constantly was an electric shock if you touched a knob with one hand and the metal case with the other, or even a forearm. It wasn’t enough to knock you down, but you knew it when it happened.
Yes, I had fun with a few friends who came over, shocking them with the set.
I have a 20-foot piece of pipe hooked to a digital antenna at our home today. It’s a long-distance powered antenna and I can pick up Casper digital stations with it, maybe 15 of them to get local stations not allowed by the FCC on Sling. The best part is I don’t have to turn it with a pipe wrench to watch Monday Night Football.