Trying Cigarettes
If anyone can really be "way out" in third grade, Bob Millen was the closest candidate of all my school classmates at Hokah Elementary. He cajoled me into learning how to properly light a match, tried to get me to smoke, related to me naughty things about girls, and would have properly led me astray, had I not lived in the country and he in Hokah.
Bob was as street-wise as could be expected in a town of two hundred people, and for some strange reason, accepted me as a friend quite early. He was scrappy and would hardly take guff from anyone, although he was not a bully. We didn't really have any bullies; we were all quite good friends.
I remember, early on, when I was a new kid in school, Bob Millen grabbing me and pulling me to the ground to wrestle. Although I was the slightest kid in school, I was wiry and we rolled around a bit and I actually had the top for a brief time before I started crying. Bob helped me to my feet and explained to me that I had him.
We were friends from that time on.
Bob Millen was, according to self-report, constantly under threat of being sent to a place called Red Wing, by his parents. We all know Red Wing to be the boys reformatory in Minnesota and I have, as an adult, actually seen the ghastly place. It is the place Bob Dylan sings about getting out of. At the time, though, I knew nothing of it or even that boys could be sent to a reformatory.
Bob talked of it as though he had been there, or at least seen it, perhaps in some sort of "scared straight" effort. He genuinely seemed to mitigate his delinquent efforts as though in fear of being sent there.
There was a little community hall in town that had a basketball court inside. Occasionally there would be some kind of activity in there and the older boys would get a game going. I even tried it. I was fast and could dash about with the ball but had no idea how to pass, shoot, or defend the goal, so I gave that up rather quickly.
Bob took me out in the alley behind the building and produced a book of matches. I cringed because the last time I had lit a match was as a two year old on my tricycle in the dirt street in Sparta. Bob showed me how to push the match against the scraper pad on the outside of the book, paying special attention to pulling my finger away as the match lit, so as not to get burned.
So that was the trick!
After I had reluctantly succeeded in lighting a few matches, he produced a pack of cigarettes. They were named "Spuds" and he said that the gas station attendant down by the Horseshoe Tavern, about a block from the Catholic school, was willing to sell them to him. They cost something like a dime a pack.
I really had no interest in smoking, but Millen (we called one another by last names because it was so cool) insisted I try.
"Take a drag," he offered, lighting one up and handing it to me. I hesitated, a look of dread on my little face.
He took the cigarette back and put it to his lips, taking a puff and blowing out the smoke, looking kind of like a ten-year-old James Dean.
He handed it back to me and I sort of placed it near my mouth and pretended to take a puff. Even at that range, the smell of the thing was enough to make me cough.
"Inhale!" Millen commanded. "And don't get it all wet! Put it just at the edge of your lips."
I put the cigarette between my fingers and placed my hand over my mouth and drew a mouthful of smoke. Then, with great drama, I closed my throat and drew a deep breath of clean air in slowly through my nose, expelling it through my mouth and carrying off the putrid smoke as though I had inhaled it. I coughed just the same.
Millen dissolved into laughter.
I had to repeat the charade a few more times until, between us, we had smoked and wasted the entire cigarette so we could move on to other things.
We were so cool. But in terms of social maturity levels, Bob was like an uncle, just back from the army, taking his young nephew around and showing him the ropes.
For all his pluck, Millen, nor any of us, engaged in much offensive behavior in school. Our teachers were, to us, old ladies regardless of their age, and they were stern. Larry and Tommy Langen told me that the teachers at the Catholic school were even more so.
Our teachers had the ace in the hole over us, the power of the recess. We lived for recess because there was the swamp, the grass hills to slide down, the giant pine tree and all the games and activities we dreamed up. It was a chance to burn off energy and we coveted it.
One day, a new student arrived who made even Bob Millen look like a cherub. He was lean and fairly tall with long, black, greasy hair and a duck-tail in the back. His eyes were cunning and he had a permanent sneer on his face. We frankly didn't know what to do because this guy was going to seriously challenge the pecking order of Hokah Elementary and he looked pretty much like a gangster. He was also from New York.
We didn't know where New York was, other than on a map, but we had seen enough television shows to associate it with crime, corruption, and killers.
He wore a light leather jacket which he kept on even in the classroom. The collar was turned up around his duck-tail.
"Where does he live?" I whispered to Don Botcher.
"Down somewhere by the Horseshoe Tavern, I think," he whispered back.
Someone was going to have to take this guy on and it certainly wasn't going to be me. I just sat there at my desk, mortified. I wondered if Bob Millen was up to it. Perhaps this new kid was back from someplace similar to Red Wing.
I chanced a brief smile and hello and was rebuffed by a look of disgust and superior bewilderment that seemed to say are you, cockroach, of the opinion that you can speak to me?
Many of us thought that he probably had switchblade knife in his pocket if not a gun. His presence was becoming a calamity and he hadn't even been in school two hours! We all felt like we were on the edge of a precipice and were about to have our little world swept away right out from under us.
But like many things in life, a benign tincture of time solved the problem, and not that much of a tincture at that! By afternoon, the new kid solved our problem all by himself.
While we were all sitting in our seats gawking and stealing sidelong glances at the new kid, the teacher decided that he was not engaging in anything meaningful at his desk and asked him to get something out and start working.
He cocked his head a bit, sensing that now was the time to establish who was in charge, and mumbled something like piss off.
Our teacher did a double take and said, "did you say something?"
Now the rubber met the road. The new kid was in for a nickel, so me might as well be in for a dime.
"Piss off," he said, a bit louder, so that we potential underlings could hear it, but perhaps the teacher wouldn't.
We could have told him that wasn't going to happen.
"Stay in your seats," she told us and stepped out of the room.
Moments later she returned with Mr. Wagner, our principal. Mr. Wagner was a retired naval officer and the Pacific Conflict had ended just a few years earlier.
Mr. Wagner walked up to the new kid, grabbed him by the collar of his leather coat and lifted him out of his seat, dragging him behind and out the classroom door.
I can't help but think that nowadays, the mother, perhaps drunk, would later storm into the classroom and read the teacher up one side and down the other, threatening a lawsuit, then be placated by the diminutive principal as the new kid re-inhabited his seat. I have seen it happen.
But, alas for that particular new kid, this was 1956.
We never saw the new kid again. Ever.
Friday, June 26, 2020
Monday, June 22, 2020
The Catholic School
The Catholic School
My only friends in Pfeffer Valley were the only other kids in Pfeffer Valley. They were the Langen kids, Tommy, Larry, and their younger sister Kay. I would usually ride my bike the mile or so to their farm and we would either hang out there or go riding bikes even further.
During the school year, Larry and Tommy were not my daily playmates because, alas, they went to the Catholic school. I didn't clearly understand why some kids went to the Catholic school.
The school bus picked them up along with some other kids in the valley next to ours, then picked up two of my classmates, Roger and Donald Johnson, who lived in the bottoms, the back of their little farm butting up to the Root River.
On the way to our school, the bus drove up the hill and made a right turn around the Catholic church and adjoining school. Larry, Tommy, and a few other kids got off there and that was the end of it.
I'm thinking about half as many kids went to the Catholic school as went to my school several blocks beyond.
We would have contact with them a few times a year. Whenever we were going to get vaccinations, or booster shots we would assemble outside our old brick building and march, according to classes, down the sidewalk, past the tavern, hardware store, and several residences and businesses, to the Catholic school. There we would wait until our turn came, and then stand in line to get our shots.
Polio vaccine was somewhat new and would entail an ordinary needle in the arm. The authorities came up with some other methods over the months and years, however. Small pox was really feared and we all got vaccinated. The small pox vaccination consisted of several pokes which left a circular indentation about the size of a quarter on the outside of your shoulder.
Everybody got one and absolutely every person you ever saw with their shirt off or wearing sleeveless shirts had this little round "coin" stamped into their shoulder, boy or girl. Furthermore, every person I saw after that had one, no matter where. It was as much a part of a person's body as their ears or nose.
The tuberculosis test was different yet. They pried a needle just under a few layers of skin on your lower forearm and injected a little bubble of something which amounted to about the size of an aspirin. Then you just forgot about it and it went away over the course of a couple of weeks. They briefly inspected the site after that. Apparently if you were exposed to tuberculosis this little bubble would flare up and alert everyone. It never happened to anyone as far as I know.
Once in a while we would be invited to the Catholic school for a picnic in the spring and everyone except a few of us would play baseball. They had a diamond at the Catholic school. I never got picked for a team because I had no skill or strength and was the smallest child in my school, including all of the girls except for one.
The small businesses and houses along the route to the Catholic school were unusual. All small buildings, their fronts were at the grade of the sidewalk, but the backs were up on stilts, because the ground on the north side of the street dropped away significantly. A person could--and we did, when we got a bit older and had more freedom--hunch down and explore beneath these small buildings. People stored things under there like old tires, wheelbarrows, extra building materials, and what-all.
On one trip walking down to the Catholic school, I was running my hand along the window frames which each store or house had, because the buildings butted right up to the sidewalk, and had a large wood sliver stick right under my thumbnail about a good half-inch in, and then break off. I had picked it up from a window sill that had gotten real dry from the sun and lack of paint.
Whatever errand we were on that day was quickly aborted for me and I ended up being taken back to our school. I suppose that Al had to drive over from La Crosse and take me back there to the hospital, where they dug out the pieces of wood. My thumbnail, needless to say, turned black and it was weeks before the black part grew out and was replaced. Even then a line became visible where the nail material had to grow back together. I can see this line to this day, some sixty-five years later.
My only friends in Pfeffer Valley were the only other kids in Pfeffer Valley. They were the Langen kids, Tommy, Larry, and their younger sister Kay. I would usually ride my bike the mile or so to their farm and we would either hang out there or go riding bikes even further.
During the school year, Larry and Tommy were not my daily playmates because, alas, they went to the Catholic school. I didn't clearly understand why some kids went to the Catholic school.
The school bus picked them up along with some other kids in the valley next to ours, then picked up two of my classmates, Roger and Donald Johnson, who lived in the bottoms, the back of their little farm butting up to the Root River.
On the way to our school, the bus drove up the hill and made a right turn around the Catholic church and adjoining school. Larry, Tommy, and a few other kids got off there and that was the end of it.
I'm thinking about half as many kids went to the Catholic school as went to my school several blocks beyond.
We would have contact with them a few times a year. Whenever we were going to get vaccinations, or booster shots we would assemble outside our old brick building and march, according to classes, down the sidewalk, past the tavern, hardware store, and several residences and businesses, to the Catholic school. There we would wait until our turn came, and then stand in line to get our shots.
Polio vaccine was somewhat new and would entail an ordinary needle in the arm. The authorities came up with some other methods over the months and years, however. Small pox was really feared and we all got vaccinated. The small pox vaccination consisted of several pokes which left a circular indentation about the size of a quarter on the outside of your shoulder.
Everybody got one and absolutely every person you ever saw with their shirt off or wearing sleeveless shirts had this little round "coin" stamped into their shoulder, boy or girl. Furthermore, every person I saw after that had one, no matter where. It was as much a part of a person's body as their ears or nose.
The tuberculosis test was different yet. They pried a needle just under a few layers of skin on your lower forearm and injected a little bubble of something which amounted to about the size of an aspirin. Then you just forgot about it and it went away over the course of a couple of weeks. They briefly inspected the site after that. Apparently if you were exposed to tuberculosis this little bubble would flare up and alert everyone. It never happened to anyone as far as I know.
Once in a while we would be invited to the Catholic school for a picnic in the spring and everyone except a few of us would play baseball. They had a diamond at the Catholic school. I never got picked for a team because I had no skill or strength and was the smallest child in my school, including all of the girls except for one.
The small businesses and houses along the route to the Catholic school were unusual. All small buildings, their fronts were at the grade of the sidewalk, but the backs were up on stilts, because the ground on the north side of the street dropped away significantly. A person could--and we did, when we got a bit older and had more freedom--hunch down and explore beneath these small buildings. People stored things under there like old tires, wheelbarrows, extra building materials, and what-all.
On one trip walking down to the Catholic school, I was running my hand along the window frames which each store or house had, because the buildings butted right up to the sidewalk, and had a large wood sliver stick right under my thumbnail about a good half-inch in, and then break off. I had picked it up from a window sill that had gotten real dry from the sun and lack of paint.
Whatever errand we were on that day was quickly aborted for me and I ended up being taken back to our school. I suppose that Al had to drive over from La Crosse and take me back there to the hospital, where they dug out the pieces of wood. My thumbnail, needless to say, turned black and it was weeks before the black part grew out and was replaced. Even then a line became visible where the nail material had to grow back together. I can see this line to this day, some sixty-five years later.
Tuesday, June 9, 2020
Helping Al and Al Make Hay
Helping Al and Al Make Hay
Making a living as a small farmer was a tough proposition even in the 1950's. Al Botcher and his friend Al Thompson, two farms down the valley, both had day jobs but both also had farms and I think they felt like a farm should be farmed.
They were hobby farmers, I guess. Al Botcher more so than Al Thompson.
My stepfather tried a number of things, some of which were quite exciting. We had the chickens and I could sneak up on them or chase them around. The bantam hens were beautiful and some of them became quite tame. I could pick them up and pet them. The bantam roosters were even more colorful.
Al fenced off some acreage for pasturing beef cattle. They had access to the cowyard and the drinking tub. They were quite large and I kept clear, considering that I had been run over by an entire herd on Grandpa Lee's farm.
One or two summers, Al had pigs in the pigpen.
The two Als had an agreement where they would make and store a whole lot of hay on one farm while they did crop rotation on the other. In addition, Al Thompson either owned or rented about forty acres in what they called the "bottoms."
The bottoms was along the flat area between Hokah and our valley where the Root River and all the creeks that ran into it had meandered back and forth for probably thousands of years. It was low lying land that could flood and be too soggy to farm. But some summers it was excellent for growing alfalfa.
As I grew a bit older and was in 4th or 5th grade, I found that I could be useful to these guys.
Cattle are constantly finding a place to rub up against the fences and posts and eventually knock over something. They also have the curious notion that the grass is better on the other side of the fence and will stick their heads between the wires of the fence to try and reach what they perceive as the greener grass. Eventually, on a rotting post, the staples will loosen and the wire falls.
In either case, before you know it, they are out and going to visit the neighbors. We didn't have horses and little four-wheelers were not invented yet, so when some neighbor called to let Al know his herd was in their vegetable garden, everything had to be dropped and all hands were on deck.
Depending on the logistics of the situation, the cows could either be pushed along the fence and back through the breach or marched up the road like a goofy cattle drive. There were usually ten or twelve and they liked to stay together, especially when a little stressed. I was sometimes useful as a blocker. The two Als would place me in a spot they didn't want the herd to go and all I had to do was look belligerent.
The Als would gently push the herd up the road or along a fence and I would stand beyond the breach so that they would see it as their best move. Sometimes they would go around me, but if only one or two did, they wanted to be with the rest of them, so they would return. I was of marginal help.
On one occasion I took it upon myself to clean out the pig shed with the scoop shovel. It was hard work but I kept at it, thinking that Al would be proud of me when he saw it. I hadn't really ever had a dad and the new situation was kindling a desire in me to seek his praise. He was preoccupied, I guess, when he came back and expressed only a mild response. I needed much more, but made do.
I learned how to operate the power lawn mower, which was a piece of junk, but I could help out that way.
I was too small to handle hay bales; I was just in the way. They would cut the alfalfa and timothy and let it dry in windrows, turning it a couple of times with a hay rake. If warm, sunny weather prevailed, they could get the baling done on a weekend or two. If it rained on the windrows, they had to be turned and dried again and much of the nutrition was lost. If it rained a lot the hay rotted. This could happen even after it was baled. The bales had to lie in the fields out in the sun for a while and dry.
Two things could happen if hay was baled when it was too moist or if it was put in the barn too quickly after baling. The first was just plain mold. The moist hay would rot and when you opened a bale, it contained layer after layer of mold and was no good. The second was the possibility of spontaneous combustion. Hay baled up too "tough" or moist and stacked in the barn many layers deep had a possibility of fermenting away and bursting into flame, burning down the barn.
All farmers were very cautious about spontaneous combustion. If there was any possibility because the hay had had to be baled to beat the rain, it was stacked outside somewhere. If it dried, you were OK. If it rotted away, the whole stack was considered to be "manure" and was abandoned to rot even more, until it could just be added in with the actual manure and spread on the fields.
One time the two Als had a bunch of hay that they had baled down in the bottoms and a rainstorm was predicted. My moment of opportunity to act like a man came, since they had only a few hours to get it loaded on haywagons that could be driven into the barn even if it weren't unloaded and stacked.
They took me with them in Al Thompson's truck down to the bottoms, where they had an old Allis-Chalmers tractor and a few hay wagons. They started the tractor and put me in the driver's seat. If they set the throttle very low, the tractor would move forward and I wouldn't have to concern myself with adjusting it.
There was a brake pedal, which I could depress to slow it down. My job was just to guide the tractor and wagon around the field, past the bales, while one Al would throw the bales up onto the wagon and the other Al would stack them.
I got the hang of it and became quite adept at steering the ensemble down the rows. There were no hills, so my only challenge was not to get headed into some place where I couldn't circle around and go past some more bales. Once in a while I drove around a circle to line up my next pass. The two Als seemed not to mind my inefficiency; things were going well.
When the wagon was nearly full, one of them whistled real loud and I put my foot on the brake and the tractor stalled. That was all right, because they hooked up another wagon and started it again for me. Off we went.
When I heard the whistle indicating that the second wagon was nearly stacked full, I put my foot on the brake and nothing happened. The tractor and wagon just kept moving. I tried again, but no slowing of my tractor and hay wagon. Both Als were standing in the field quite a ways behind, wondering what was going on.
I drove around in a few circles before they realized that I was unable to stop the tractor. One of them jumped aboard and shut off the throttle. Then they inspected the brake and found that it was gone, just a metal housing remaining. No brake pad.
I was horrified, thinking that I had wrecked the tractor. Al Thompson surmised that I had been "riding the brake," which I had been. I had been making constant slowing adjustments by pushing gently on the brake all this time, and I had worn it off.
The two Als did not see this as a big issue and, actually, had a bit of a laugh over it. They had almost all the hay, and Al Thompson simply drove the tractor on the flat field without needing to brake as they picked up the remaining bales.
Putting new pads on the brakes was apparently not so difficult.
Making a living as a small farmer was a tough proposition even in the 1950's. Al Botcher and his friend Al Thompson, two farms down the valley, both had day jobs but both also had farms and I think they felt like a farm should be farmed.
They were hobby farmers, I guess. Al Botcher more so than Al Thompson.
My stepfather tried a number of things, some of which were quite exciting. We had the chickens and I could sneak up on them or chase them around. The bantam hens were beautiful and some of them became quite tame. I could pick them up and pet them. The bantam roosters were even more colorful.
Al fenced off some acreage for pasturing beef cattle. They had access to the cowyard and the drinking tub. They were quite large and I kept clear, considering that I had been run over by an entire herd on Grandpa Lee's farm.
One or two summers, Al had pigs in the pigpen.
The two Als had an agreement where they would make and store a whole lot of hay on one farm while they did crop rotation on the other. In addition, Al Thompson either owned or rented about forty acres in what they called the "bottoms."
The bottoms was along the flat area between Hokah and our valley where the Root River and all the creeks that ran into it had meandered back and forth for probably thousands of years. It was low lying land that could flood and be too soggy to farm. But some summers it was excellent for growing alfalfa.
As I grew a bit older and was in 4th or 5th grade, I found that I could be useful to these guys.
Cattle are constantly finding a place to rub up against the fences and posts and eventually knock over something. They also have the curious notion that the grass is better on the other side of the fence and will stick their heads between the wires of the fence to try and reach what they perceive as the greener grass. Eventually, on a rotting post, the staples will loosen and the wire falls.
In either case, before you know it, they are out and going to visit the neighbors. We didn't have horses and little four-wheelers were not invented yet, so when some neighbor called to let Al know his herd was in their vegetable garden, everything had to be dropped and all hands were on deck.
Depending on the logistics of the situation, the cows could either be pushed along the fence and back through the breach or marched up the road like a goofy cattle drive. There were usually ten or twelve and they liked to stay together, especially when a little stressed. I was sometimes useful as a blocker. The two Als would place me in a spot they didn't want the herd to go and all I had to do was look belligerent.
The Als would gently push the herd up the road or along a fence and I would stand beyond the breach so that they would see it as their best move. Sometimes they would go around me, but if only one or two did, they wanted to be with the rest of them, so they would return. I was of marginal help.
On one occasion I took it upon myself to clean out the pig shed with the scoop shovel. It was hard work but I kept at it, thinking that Al would be proud of me when he saw it. I hadn't really ever had a dad and the new situation was kindling a desire in me to seek his praise. He was preoccupied, I guess, when he came back and expressed only a mild response. I needed much more, but made do.
I learned how to operate the power lawn mower, which was a piece of junk, but I could help out that way.
I was too small to handle hay bales; I was just in the way. They would cut the alfalfa and timothy and let it dry in windrows, turning it a couple of times with a hay rake. If warm, sunny weather prevailed, they could get the baling done on a weekend or two. If it rained on the windrows, they had to be turned and dried again and much of the nutrition was lost. If it rained a lot the hay rotted. This could happen even after it was baled. The bales had to lie in the fields out in the sun for a while and dry.
Two things could happen if hay was baled when it was too moist or if it was put in the barn too quickly after baling. The first was just plain mold. The moist hay would rot and when you opened a bale, it contained layer after layer of mold and was no good. The second was the possibility of spontaneous combustion. Hay baled up too "tough" or moist and stacked in the barn many layers deep had a possibility of fermenting away and bursting into flame, burning down the barn.
All farmers were very cautious about spontaneous combustion. If there was any possibility because the hay had had to be baled to beat the rain, it was stacked outside somewhere. If it dried, you were OK. If it rotted away, the whole stack was considered to be "manure" and was abandoned to rot even more, until it could just be added in with the actual manure and spread on the fields.
One time the two Als had a bunch of hay that they had baled down in the bottoms and a rainstorm was predicted. My moment of opportunity to act like a man came, since they had only a few hours to get it loaded on haywagons that could be driven into the barn even if it weren't unloaded and stacked.
They took me with them in Al Thompson's truck down to the bottoms, where they had an old Allis-Chalmers tractor and a few hay wagons. They started the tractor and put me in the driver's seat. If they set the throttle very low, the tractor would move forward and I wouldn't have to concern myself with adjusting it.
There was a brake pedal, which I could depress to slow it down. My job was just to guide the tractor and wagon around the field, past the bales, while one Al would throw the bales up onto the wagon and the other Al would stack them.
I got the hang of it and became quite adept at steering the ensemble down the rows. There were no hills, so my only challenge was not to get headed into some place where I couldn't circle around and go past some more bales. Once in a while I drove around a circle to line up my next pass. The two Als seemed not to mind my inefficiency; things were going well.
When the wagon was nearly full, one of them whistled real loud and I put my foot on the brake and the tractor stalled. That was all right, because they hooked up another wagon and started it again for me. Off we went.
When I heard the whistle indicating that the second wagon was nearly stacked full, I put my foot on the brake and nothing happened. The tractor and wagon just kept moving. I tried again, but no slowing of my tractor and hay wagon. Both Als were standing in the field quite a ways behind, wondering what was going on.
I drove around in a few circles before they realized that I was unable to stop the tractor. One of them jumped aboard and shut off the throttle. Then they inspected the brake and found that it was gone, just a metal housing remaining. No brake pad.
I was horrified, thinking that I had wrecked the tractor. Al Thompson surmised that I had been "riding the brake," which I had been. I had been making constant slowing adjustments by pushing gently on the brake all this time, and I had worn it off.
The two Als did not see this as a big issue and, actually, had a bit of a laugh over it. They had almost all the hay, and Al Thompson simply drove the tractor on the flat field without needing to brake as they picked up the remaining bales.
Putting new pads on the brakes was apparently not so difficult.
Monday, June 1, 2020
Television
Television
In the 1950's Al Botcher brought home to the farm the most awesome, cutting-edge device of the day. He purchased a television set. For the benefit of my grandkids I have to describe how the earliest televisions worked because they are a totally different animal from the ones we have today, just as the telephones were.
Television as we know it today is digital technology. It relies upon millions of tiny computational gates printed upon chips. The picture is really constructed of little pixels, or light-emitting diodes, connected to these chips.
The television that Al brought home was a completely different animal, much like we are a completely different animal when compared to our predecessors the apes.
Our new TV was a big monstrosity in a wooden cabinet as big as a clothes dryer. It had to be in a big cabinet because instead of a wonderful rare-earth flat screen, it mainly consisted of a picture tube, the front of which was the "screen" that we looked at, and the rear of that tube extended back into the cabinet about two and a half feet.
The rear of the picture tube funneled down to about the diameter of a pop bottle in back and wrapped around it was a "yoke" made up of many, many windings of copper wire in the up-down plane and in the left-right plane. The whole thing was called a cathode-ray tube.
The idea of the cathode-ray tube is that the little base in back fires a stream of electrons right at the middle of the front of the screen which is coated with a material that absorbs a certain portion of them and fluoresces. The picture to be shown to us is scanned by a camera that amounts to the opposite of the television. The brighter part of the picture scanned causes a stronger radio signal, which the TV set intercepts and causes a correlating increase in the amount of electrons fired at the middle of the screen.
But it is of no use to us to have all the information mashed into one point in the middle of that great big screen. That is what the windings are on that yoke in back. Electricity is also fed through these windings. Electricity and magnetism are the same thing in a certain sense, so the current travelling through the windings creates a magnetic field.
In the back of the TV and taking up a lot of room are a couple of aluminum chassis, like rectangular upside-down boxes. Several more electron tubes are mounted on this chassis along with a lot of other hardware that isn't even used in TV's anymore, but was necessary in the early ones. All of these things, resistors, capacitors, coils, chokes, transformers, and such were wired and soldered together to make a circuit that caused the stream of electrons to be deflected in a very specific manner by the strength of the magnetic fields created by the current in those windings on that yoke.
The beam of electrons scans the surface of the front of that tube and paints a path across it, drops down an ever-so-slight amount, and paints a path back, repeating this until it gets to the bottom of the front of that tube. Then it goes to the top and starts over.
This happens many, many times per second.
All the while, the strength of that beam fired from the back of that cathode-ray tube by the "electron gun" is varying with the lightness and darkness of the picture that they wanted us to see. All this is going on like a foaming froth on the front of that picture tube and the only reason we see the picture at all is that when our eyes are stimulated, the image stays for a quarter of a second before dissipating.
It's a wonder that the whole mind-boggling idea even worked at all, but it did. All we had to know was how to adjust two parameters of the process. There were two knobs, one marked "horizontal hold" and the other marked "vertical hold". What these knobs did was to make tiny adjustments of the speed at which the windings on the yoke of that cathode-ray tube deflected the stream of electrons.
If the vertical hold adjustment was a little bit off, the picture would roll from up to down on the screen. As you slowly turned the knob the rolling would slow and when you had it perfect it would lock in place.
If the horizontal hold adjustment was a little bit off, the picture would be torn into pieces from left to right and would look like a bunch of nonsense. As you slowly adjusted the knob, suddenly it would shift into coherence and look like what it was supposed to.
There were contrast adjustments, which simply made the whole picture lighter or darker to your visual preference.
So far we have been talking only about the picture! The sound had to be processed by the set as well. Upon another chassis inside that thing was built, out of all these crazy vacuum tubes and components, a radio receiver.
The picture signal came on one frequency and the sound came on a completely different one. The radio simply played to go along with the picture. That was all handled at the transmission station, and there were standardized pairs of frequencies assigned to each channel.
When you turned the switch on, nothing happened right away, just as in the case of my mother's kitchen radio. The tubes had to "warm up". Their cathodes had to heat up enough to begin firing a steady stream of electrons. Then all the little devices within them would function to process the signal.
You would look at the blank screen, waiting for something to happen, when suddenly a small dot would appear somewhere, ripple, and quickly expand to an entire picture. At about the same time there would be a humming sound. Suddenly the radio inside the TV would start babbling away and you were off to the races.
Al's new TV was a Motorola and it truly was a marvel. Black and white picture, of course. It would be a while before they figured out how to do color and that entails an unbelievably complex bunch of gadgetry and some more frequencies, several years in the future.
I now had some entertainment as I waited long after dark for Al and my mother to arrive home from work and perhaps grocery shopping. There were certain shows, many of them cowboy shows, provided on different evenings, just as there are today. Paladin, The Rifleman, The Virginian, The Big Valley, Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Gunsmoke, The FBI (Just the facts, ma'am, just give me the facts), Sugarfoot, and the list goes on and on.
There were also movies, boxing matches, the news, and Lawrence Welk and his Champagne Orchestra. Ronald Reagan was an actor then, not the President of the United States, and he would introduce the movie of the night.
Each program had it's theme song and you knew you were missing the program if you heard it blaring away.
Cable TV had not been invented. Once in a while you would hear the idea of "pay TV" floated and people would say, "no way!" A major city usually had a channel and La Crosse, Wisconsin had Channel 8. Their call sign was WKBT. But Al had to have an antenna to receive the signals. In La Crosse you would have been able to get away with having a set of "rabbit ears", a V-shaped antenna that just sat on top of the TV or a nearby dresser or bookcase and was wired into the back.
Pfeffer Valley, however, was hidden between sets of high ridges and we had to have an antenna on a short mast on top of the house, and it had to be pointed in the direction of La Crosse, which was pretty much east.
Eau Claire, which was more north, had a channel, WEAU but you had to physically turn the antenna to point more north before it would come in. We were pretty much stuck with Channel 8 because the ridges were high and La Crosse's transmitter was on a tower up on one of them.
Electromagnetic radio waves can bounce off large objects like rock cliffs, so there was always some part of the signal getting into the nooks and crannies of the land unless you were really isolated or down in a hole.
I watched TV in the evening and when my favorite couple of cowboy shows were over and they played the theme music, I would leave the TV on because otherwise I was afraid of being alone in the dark. A lot of the material they showed in the movies was scary and after being sensitized by them, the sound of a raccoon scuffling on the concrete step outside sounded like an axe murderer sizing up the door before breaking it down.
The TV could go on the blink and stop working. If you were lucky it was one of the ten or twelve tubes. You took off the back, pulled out the tubes and took them to the hardware store where they had a tube checker. Tubes had usually nine wire pins on the bottom but there were different sizes of them depending upon the amount of current they had to deal with.
The tube tester had several rows of sockets. The tubes had their identifying numbers etched into their sides. They were numbers like 6V6, 6AQ8, 12BA6, 12BE6, and so forth. There were hundreds of them. Some of them were amplifiers, some were rectifiers, they all did something to the electrical pulses that were going through the receivers. You plugged the tube into the socket the little book listed and a meter pointer told you whether it was functioning properly or weakly, or not at all. A new tube, which cost a couple of dollars, would fix the problem.
There are lots of other things that can go wrong and anything deeper required the TV repairman. There were people that made a good living just repairing radios and TV's. You could bring the set in or they would come out and service it right in your home. They had a van with all the testers, most common tubes, and other common spare parts.
Nowadays the TV stops working and we throw it out, buy a new one at WalMart.
The TV stations did not run around the clock like they do now. The government made them shut down at night because a strange thing happens after dark. The ionosphere, one of the topmost layers of the atmosphere has been broiling in the sun all day and the atoms in it become ionized, which is why they call it the ionosphere. The electrons of the atoms have been absorbing energy from the sun and are stimulated into more energetic orbitals in their atom.
At night the ionosphere would "cool". The electrons would drop down into lower energy orbitals and the whole ionosphere would shrink a little bit and become less transparent to our radio signals, which had been going right on through it into space. At night, when the ionosphere becomes more opaque, these signals bounce on it.
The government runs a lot of radio operations and there is quite a competition for "bandwidth" because there is only a finite amount of it, before everybody's radio signals start crowding one another. So at night, when the signals are likely to skip and go farther, they are likely to interfere with other important signals, so the government made stations sign off in the evening.
They still do this with AM radio, only they only make them reduce power from perhaps ten kilowatts to a hundred watts. If you listen, even today, to an AM station towards evening you will hear it suddenly become extremely faint.
Certain frequencies are much more likely to skip and in the old time television, it was the frequency that the sound came in on that was the worst.
When I was a boy in single-digits of age, watching the cowboy shows, I had absolutely no idea that all this stuff was going on in that television set.
I just figured it was some kind of magic.
In the 1950's Al Botcher brought home to the farm the most awesome, cutting-edge device of the day. He purchased a television set. For the benefit of my grandkids I have to describe how the earliest televisions worked because they are a totally different animal from the ones we have today, just as the telephones were.
Television as we know it today is digital technology. It relies upon millions of tiny computational gates printed upon chips. The picture is really constructed of little pixels, or light-emitting diodes, connected to these chips.
The television that Al brought home was a completely different animal, much like we are a completely different animal when compared to our predecessors the apes.
Our new TV was a big monstrosity in a wooden cabinet as big as a clothes dryer. It had to be in a big cabinet because instead of a wonderful rare-earth flat screen, it mainly consisted of a picture tube, the front of which was the "screen" that we looked at, and the rear of that tube extended back into the cabinet about two and a half feet.
The rear of the picture tube funneled down to about the diameter of a pop bottle in back and wrapped around it was a "yoke" made up of many, many windings of copper wire in the up-down plane and in the left-right plane. The whole thing was called a cathode-ray tube.
The idea of the cathode-ray tube is that the little base in back fires a stream of electrons right at the middle of the front of the screen which is coated with a material that absorbs a certain portion of them and fluoresces. The picture to be shown to us is scanned by a camera that amounts to the opposite of the television. The brighter part of the picture scanned causes a stronger radio signal, which the TV set intercepts and causes a correlating increase in the amount of electrons fired at the middle of the screen.
But it is of no use to us to have all the information mashed into one point in the middle of that great big screen. That is what the windings are on that yoke in back. Electricity is also fed through these windings. Electricity and magnetism are the same thing in a certain sense, so the current travelling through the windings creates a magnetic field.
In the back of the TV and taking up a lot of room are a couple of aluminum chassis, like rectangular upside-down boxes. Several more electron tubes are mounted on this chassis along with a lot of other hardware that isn't even used in TV's anymore, but was necessary in the early ones. All of these things, resistors, capacitors, coils, chokes, transformers, and such were wired and soldered together to make a circuit that caused the stream of electrons to be deflected in a very specific manner by the strength of the magnetic fields created by the current in those windings on that yoke.
The beam of electrons scans the surface of the front of that tube and paints a path across it, drops down an ever-so-slight amount, and paints a path back, repeating this until it gets to the bottom of the front of that tube. Then it goes to the top and starts over.
This happens many, many times per second.
All the while, the strength of that beam fired from the back of that cathode-ray tube by the "electron gun" is varying with the lightness and darkness of the picture that they wanted us to see. All this is going on like a foaming froth on the front of that picture tube and the only reason we see the picture at all is that when our eyes are stimulated, the image stays for a quarter of a second before dissipating.
It's a wonder that the whole mind-boggling idea even worked at all, but it did. All we had to know was how to adjust two parameters of the process. There were two knobs, one marked "horizontal hold" and the other marked "vertical hold". What these knobs did was to make tiny adjustments of the speed at which the windings on the yoke of that cathode-ray tube deflected the stream of electrons.
If the vertical hold adjustment was a little bit off, the picture would roll from up to down on the screen. As you slowly turned the knob the rolling would slow and when you had it perfect it would lock in place.
If the horizontal hold adjustment was a little bit off, the picture would be torn into pieces from left to right and would look like a bunch of nonsense. As you slowly adjusted the knob, suddenly it would shift into coherence and look like what it was supposed to.
There were contrast adjustments, which simply made the whole picture lighter or darker to your visual preference.
So far we have been talking only about the picture! The sound had to be processed by the set as well. Upon another chassis inside that thing was built, out of all these crazy vacuum tubes and components, a radio receiver.
The picture signal came on one frequency and the sound came on a completely different one. The radio simply played to go along with the picture. That was all handled at the transmission station, and there were standardized pairs of frequencies assigned to each channel.
When you turned the switch on, nothing happened right away, just as in the case of my mother's kitchen radio. The tubes had to "warm up". Their cathodes had to heat up enough to begin firing a steady stream of electrons. Then all the little devices within them would function to process the signal.
You would look at the blank screen, waiting for something to happen, when suddenly a small dot would appear somewhere, ripple, and quickly expand to an entire picture. At about the same time there would be a humming sound. Suddenly the radio inside the TV would start babbling away and you were off to the races.
Al's new TV was a Motorola and it truly was a marvel. Black and white picture, of course. It would be a while before they figured out how to do color and that entails an unbelievably complex bunch of gadgetry and some more frequencies, several years in the future.
I now had some entertainment as I waited long after dark for Al and my mother to arrive home from work and perhaps grocery shopping. There were certain shows, many of them cowboy shows, provided on different evenings, just as there are today. Paladin, The Rifleman, The Virginian, The Big Valley, Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Gunsmoke, The FBI (Just the facts, ma'am, just give me the facts), Sugarfoot, and the list goes on and on.
There were also movies, boxing matches, the news, and Lawrence Welk and his Champagne Orchestra. Ronald Reagan was an actor then, not the President of the United States, and he would introduce the movie of the night.
Each program had it's theme song and you knew you were missing the program if you heard it blaring away.
Cable TV had not been invented. Once in a while you would hear the idea of "pay TV" floated and people would say, "no way!" A major city usually had a channel and La Crosse, Wisconsin had Channel 8. Their call sign was WKBT. But Al had to have an antenna to receive the signals. In La Crosse you would have been able to get away with having a set of "rabbit ears", a V-shaped antenna that just sat on top of the TV or a nearby dresser or bookcase and was wired into the back.
Pfeffer Valley, however, was hidden between sets of high ridges and we had to have an antenna on a short mast on top of the house, and it had to be pointed in the direction of La Crosse, which was pretty much east.
Eau Claire, which was more north, had a channel, WEAU but you had to physically turn the antenna to point more north before it would come in. We were pretty much stuck with Channel 8 because the ridges were high and La Crosse's transmitter was on a tower up on one of them.
Electromagnetic radio waves can bounce off large objects like rock cliffs, so there was always some part of the signal getting into the nooks and crannies of the land unless you were really isolated or down in a hole.
I watched TV in the evening and when my favorite couple of cowboy shows were over and they played the theme music, I would leave the TV on because otherwise I was afraid of being alone in the dark. A lot of the material they showed in the movies was scary and after being sensitized by them, the sound of a raccoon scuffling on the concrete step outside sounded like an axe murderer sizing up the door before breaking it down.
The TV could go on the blink and stop working. If you were lucky it was one of the ten or twelve tubes. You took off the back, pulled out the tubes and took them to the hardware store where they had a tube checker. Tubes had usually nine wire pins on the bottom but there were different sizes of them depending upon the amount of current they had to deal with.
The tube tester had several rows of sockets. The tubes had their identifying numbers etched into their sides. They were numbers like 6V6, 6AQ8, 12BA6, 12BE6, and so forth. There were hundreds of them. Some of them were amplifiers, some were rectifiers, they all did something to the electrical pulses that were going through the receivers. You plugged the tube into the socket the little book listed and a meter pointer told you whether it was functioning properly or weakly, or not at all. A new tube, which cost a couple of dollars, would fix the problem.
There are lots of other things that can go wrong and anything deeper required the TV repairman. There were people that made a good living just repairing radios and TV's. You could bring the set in or they would come out and service it right in your home. They had a van with all the testers, most common tubes, and other common spare parts.
Nowadays the TV stops working and we throw it out, buy a new one at WalMart.
The TV stations did not run around the clock like they do now. The government made them shut down at night because a strange thing happens after dark. The ionosphere, one of the topmost layers of the atmosphere has been broiling in the sun all day and the atoms in it become ionized, which is why they call it the ionosphere. The electrons of the atoms have been absorbing energy from the sun and are stimulated into more energetic orbitals in their atom.
At night the ionosphere would "cool". The electrons would drop down into lower energy orbitals and the whole ionosphere would shrink a little bit and become less transparent to our radio signals, which had been going right on through it into space. At night, when the ionosphere becomes more opaque, these signals bounce on it.
The government runs a lot of radio operations and there is quite a competition for "bandwidth" because there is only a finite amount of it, before everybody's radio signals start crowding one another. So at night, when the signals are likely to skip and go farther, they are likely to interfere with other important signals, so the government made stations sign off in the evening.
They still do this with AM radio, only they only make them reduce power from perhaps ten kilowatts to a hundred watts. If you listen, even today, to an AM station towards evening you will hear it suddenly become extremely faint.
Certain frequencies are much more likely to skip and in the old time television, it was the frequency that the sound came in on that was the worst.
When I was a boy in single-digits of age, watching the cowboy shows, I had absolutely no idea that all this stuff was going on in that television set.
I just figured it was some kind of magic.
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