Mae's Real Stories

Like the telephone, TV has changed a great deal since I was a little girl. In fact, in my really early life, no one had a TV at all. Only a few TV sets existed, and only for demonstration. I was at least 8 years old when a neighbor family first had a television. It had such a small screen that there was a sort of magnifying lens in front so that you could see the picture. For a long time, TV pictures were always in black and white and grey, no color.

In the afternoon, children could watch a show called "Howdy Doody," about a puppet by that name and his friends. Two characters on the show -- Buffalo Bob and Claribel the Clown -- were real people, dressed up as a cowboy and a clown. (The picture shows Buffalo Bob holding Howdy Doody.)

Princess SummerFallWinterSpring was another puppet on "Howdy Doody." During the show, a lot of kids were also involved. They sat in two rows of chairs called the Peanut Gallery near the place where the puppets walked and moved around. At the beginning they sang a song It's Howdy Doody time, and at end of the show, the kids could wave and say hi to their friends and family.

Later we watched some comedy shows like "I Love Lucy" and a kids' show called "Mickey Mouse Club." Our parents sometimes watched the evening news programs. Of course, lots of parents still watch TV news shows, but now the news is on all day and all night instead of just a half an hour now and then. And now you can also get news from the internet on a computer.

When Evelyn was very little, she watched a few shows like "Sesame Street" and "Mr.Rogers' Neighborhood." The picture shows Mr. Rogers next to Big Bird, the Sesame Street chracter. This is funny since the two shows were quite separate. When Evelyn was a little older, she and her friends Robin and Lissa liked a show called "The Brady Bunch." All the kids her age liked to watch it.

Until Evelyn was in high school, people could only watch the shows that were on TV at the time they turned it on. Finally, someone invented a tape recorder and player to work with a TV set. Now DVDs and TiVO let you watch whatever shows and movies you want to see. You can watch on a TV, an iPod, a computer, or other device. These are all new technologies, and more inventions are being created all the time.