by Maxwell Hammer

Created on: August 10, 2007

The 60's and 70's were the true golden age of television. Sure, some old folks will say it was the 50's, but how could that be? They hadn't even invented reruns yet. Did you know that the entire cast of The Beverly Hillbillies made almost nothing off the show? They got paid their salary, but when the show was over that's all they got. Back then reruns weren't around so no one thought to put payment for repeats in their contract. Most shows were shown once, then again in the summer, and that was it. They were put in the can. Except Buddy Ebsen, aka Uncle Jed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:EbsenasJedClampet t.jpg His agent had the sense to put a clause in the contract that said he got paid every time the show was televised. He made a fortune, but Ellie and Jethro were just dumb hicks who got typecast and never worked again.

http://www.big13.net/NBC%20Peacock/Peacock_Cle anup.JPG

At that time you were lucky if you got 3 channels. Four if you counted PBS, but no one did. If you wanted to spend a bunch of money on an antenna tower and a power booster you could get another channel, maybe. If you were lucky it would be a weird independent channel on UHF that would show the Muppet Show, The Real McCoys and Star Trek. But getting those channels in was like cracking a safe. You had to twist knobs, fiddle with the antenna, even put little pieces of aluminum foil on it. I never did know what good that did. I don't know how many times I had to stand outside the house, turning the antenna around while my dad was inside yelling "a little to the east, no, the other east, you idiot!"

Even if you had cable you might only have gotten 12 channels. One of them would have been TBS and another might have been WGN out of Chicago. It showed Bozo the Clown in the morning. One of the channels on cable just showed a clock on a wall all day. The camera would slowly turn around in a circle showing a wall that had ads for local businesses. Every minute or it made a full circle and came back to the clock. Boy, that was exciting, let me tell you. Cable only cost about 10 bucks a month, though. For another 10 you could have HBO or Showtime. MTV didn't come along until 81 and CNN was about that time as well.

In the 50's not that many people had a TV, and most TV stations only broadcast for a few hours a day. By the 70's everyone had at least one, and probably 2 sets. Usually it was a big new color one in the living room and the old black and white in the den, rumpus room, basement or one of the

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