The Ability to Watch TV In Bangor Turns 70 Years Old This Month
I ain't getting any younger...
As I scream toward 50 years old, I feel like we all have a story about how things were different in our day. For instance, I'm old enough to remember when the internet as we know it, didn't even exist. Information came from TV, or you had to drag out the set of often vastly outdated encyclopedias. Now it's all about Wikipedia.
I remember my mom telling me a similar story from her childhood growing up in Eddington. Her family was the one in town to get a television set. All sorts of people from town came over to gawk at this new technological wonder. In fact, there were so few TV shows, most folks came over and just watched the test pattern.
TV was only on sometimes.
For that matter most people in the greater Bangor area were in a similar boat, as WABI went on the air for the first time on February 2nd, 1953. In a post from a while back on the Bangor, Maine Radio & TV Facebook page, there was a photo of an article from the Bangor Daily News about WABI going on the air.
Until then, according to the clipping, there were sporadic shows that you could only catch when the weather conditions were just right. Ha, it would seem not much has changed. Although things are a little better since all TV stations switched over to a fully digital format.
TV killed the radio star.
Before this WABI was all radio, and then jumped into the game as folks were buying more TV sets. And I have to say, that's one of the weirdest parts of reading the little article. The fact that TV and TV sets were being described as a novelty. And that "someday" there "might" be a set in every home. Crazy to think in those terms, right?
Here we are, not even 70 years later. You can actually talk to a lot of people that were around long before TV, and get a feel for life before TV. Just a few years from now, that will be an impossible conversation. And several years after that, I'll probably tell my grand nieces and nephews about the crazy days before the internet.