The curious case of the indoor television antenna

The house in which we grew up had five floors, six if you count the curious appendage tucked beneath the roof, a pink fiberglass cocoon that held, of all things, a television antenna.

Instead of standing tall and free outside, where all of its brethren poked their wiry arms into the air, pulling down signals from the sky, ours was like the kid who never came out to play, the one around whom cruel rumors floated.

Having the only indoor TV antenna on the block or, for that matter, the whole town wasn’t something we talked about in polite society.

It just wasn’t done.

But I always wondered about how the decision to locate it where it was came about, and the only thing that made any sense was the contractors just forgot about it.

I spent an inordinate amount of time on the roof of our house, gamboling from level to level, straddling the eaves and taking the sun on the exposed southern front, transistor tucked in the gutter.

And so I know for a fact that the guys who built that house could have easily placed the antenna up there, where it might actually have worked; instead, we grew up never knowing what a clear picture looked like.

To me, it was almost always fuzzy or snowy or horizontally challenged, but as the nuns always stressed, children in Africa went to bed hungry and never even got a chance to see Goldie Hawn gyrating in a bikini on “Laugh-In” or enjoy an episode of “Dark Shadows,” perhaps my favorite afternoon guilty pleasure, especially the ones set in old-time Collinsport, home of Barnabas.

So I counted my blessings.

Dad wouldn’t invest in a color TV because he believed there was something very suspicious about being able to turn the grass blue and the sky green when watching a ballgame.

To him, those tint and hue knobs were up to no good.

Dad was an accomplished sewing machine maestro, able to patch ripped jeans as easily as he could create slipcovers for the chairs and draperies for the windows.

He could make that Singer sing.

The problem was every single time he fired it up, three floors above the family room, the picture — which wasn’t very sharp to begin with — went spastic.

It didn’t take me long to make the connection, but after four or five sprints up the stairs to Dad’s den, asking him to stop, I began to feel ashamed of myself.

I’m older now, some would even say old, but I still remember that useless TV antenna stuck inside that chilly, claustrophobic belfry, unable to do the only job it had.

And I can’t help but wonder how different things might have been had we only had cable.

These days, that onetime TV breakthrough seems like a lifetime ago, but I still remember how it came to my little town and the way it changed so much. I recall the little black box, which subscribers picked up after waiting in a long line of traffic moving slowly in the parking lot of a department store. Once you got it home, you had to figure out which cable fit in which input on the back of the set, then deal with the remote control device, quite a luxury item.

The first iteration offered a moderate array of selections beyond what was available locally. The Weather Channel was an immediate favorite, as was VH-1, along with a couple of stations that featured classic movies and old sitcoms.

ESPN was in its heyday, as were CNN and C-SPAN, and I used to enjoy the PTL Club, with Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, a Christian couple that hawked heirloom Bibles, among other steeply priced evangelical keepsakes, before they ran into legal trouble.

Like most drugs, cable television was undeniably addictive, especially when it came to pay services like HBO. For a while back then, there was an urban legend that held if you wrapped the output cord in tin foil, the signal came in, well, free of charge.

Naturally, I took advantage of that loophole in the billing cycle.

Cable, even with hundreds of channels on demand, has seen better days now that streaming is all in vogue, but one of these years, I have a feeling everything — especially live sporting events — will be hidden behind pay walls, pricing many out of the market.

I miss the days when three channels were more than sufficient and no one felt cheated when they signed off for the night. There was something comforting about that test signal, a reminder it was time for bed before “Captain Kangaroo” began another morning.

My wife and I cut the cable when we were still living in Carolina and never considered it when we moved back home. Oh, there’s a “smart TV” in the living room, but I’m not intelligent enough to use it very often, only when I can find Notre Dame football games.

From antennas to cable boxes to streaming, TV has always found its way into our homes, even when it’s being completely ignored.

Mike Dewey can be reached at Carolinamiked@aol.com or 1317 Troy Road, Ashland, OH 44805. He invites you to join him on his Facebook page, where radio is often the preferred medium.