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Look Familiar? Did You Ever “Play Television” As A Kid?

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Eyes Of A Generation.com

Look Familiar? Did You Ever “Play Television” As A Kid? I Did…

These photos are from 1959 and show is a mighty fine store bought camera. Something I never saw before. Mine were all home made.

I’ll share my story if you share yours, OK? I remember being in the first grade and already wanting to be an announcer. Earlier that year, I had been on ‘The Don McNeil Breakfast Club’ in Chicago and that left a lasting impression. I would watch TV shows and say what the man on TV said, but then I took it up a notch and added a microphone to my act….sort of.

My mother had an Elecralux canister vacuum cleaner. The long black cord had a male plug for the wall and a female plug for the vacuum. I used the female end as a mic and could pull my cable just like the man on TV. One day, I got the bright idea of plugging the cord into the wall to do my announcing. Everything was fine till I got a little to close to the “mic” and got shocked.

I modified my technique after that, but kept on “announcing”. I still do, but now it’s for money. Tell me your story! Enjoy and share. -Bobby Ellerbee

By the way, thanks to Ken Heinemann for these pictures of a cardboard camera he sent away for. The lenses had red, blue and green gel on them so this must have been a “color” camera.



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24 responses to “Look Familiar? Did You Ever “Play Television” As A Kid?”

  1. Mary Rita Smith Shull

    Thank you, my dad worked on the Don McNeil breakfast club from radio days to early tv at WBKB in Chicago. I have a script from a show in 1949.

  2. Gene Christianson

    I would have loved that! I had to slap my own cardboard camera together when I was little. This one looks a little more realistic than mine, although I did fool some of my friends.

  3. Ed Eaves

    These photos are amazing Ken, can you tell us the year and any other details about the kids?

  4. Cory Heisterkamp

    Wow! I had to make do with poorly cut plywood scraps.

  5. Dan Woodall

    My camera was a box with a tin can on the front (that was the lens). The boom mic was a tea strainer suspended from a broom handle. It was fun.

  6. John Robert Hampson III

    After seeing my first TV Studio in Chicago, at WBKB I went home and constructed my first TV camera, built in 1947. My Sister, Ellanat was the Talent. The Camera was a Shoe Box with a toilet paper cardboard center as a lens and a hole in the back as a Viewfinder. I mounted this camera on the backrest of a swivel desk chair. I also built a radio station in my bedroom in 1950. It had a three input mixer with a mike and a record player attached. These Glorious sounds were fed into an amplifier and then to a speaker mounted under our porch facing outward at 23 South Vine Street in Hinsdale, Illinois. After coming home from Grade School I would power up my radio station WJIM, (my nick name). I don’t think the neighbors gave my station a very high rating.

  7. David Breneman

    I never got a shock from my Electrolux power cord mic, but it certainly scared my mom when she discovered it was plugged in.

  8. Dave Lennie

    Fisher-Price put out this toy in the mid-70’s… I had SO much fun with it when I was a kid and I still have most of the pieces. The camera actually displayed an image on an optically rear-projected screen so I would make little TV shows with the action figures. No zoom but it did focus! Shoelaces served as the cables, and it came with a live truck, scaffolding, jumpsuited technician, frazzled producer, and a reporter. So friggin’ cool.

  9. Mike Plott

    Yup! Mine wasn’t as elaborate as this though.

  10. Alan Maretsky

    My TV genesis started with a marvelous book written by KOMO TV Engineer Dic Gardner called ” Be On TV”. I still have the book.

  11. Dave Dillman

    Of course I did! Cameras were made from Tide boxes and we had real sound, sort of… My pal Bill Tetzlaff’s dad worked for the phone company so we had a bunch of old telephone transmitters and ear pieces. We even made a “mixer” with switches made from an Erector set. You can imagine my thrill when I got to use real cameras a few years later in high school.

  12. Sal Sax

    I used to tape record myself as a news announcer

  13. Bruce Hansen

    I pestered my parents till they bought me a small black and white vidicon security type camera. Then a couple of years later, a last-years-model 1/2″ reel to reel VTR (pre EIAJ).

  14. Alan Gardner

    Yes, but then it was called “Local Origination” by most cable companies. LOL.

  15. Bob-Mary Delaforce

    In the days of Bud Collyer and ‘Beat the Clock’ he’d tuck his mic under his arm to be “hands free” to demonstrate the bit. It looked like a drumstick and so I used a drumstick to imitate him at age 4. That led to an obsession that led to 10 years in the business before “two roads diverged in a yellow wood” as they say. I still keep “in” by community access television work – more fun, more diverse.

  16. Alan Rosenfeld

    Right after my father bought his Wollensak reel to reel recorder to record Met Opera broadcasts my brother and I began making “funny” (at least to us) radio play type tapes. My first exposure to TV as a career opportunity came the day my parent’s friend took me to spend the day at the old WNEW-TV in NYC where he was the film director at the time, I was 10 years old or so. I sat in Master Control and watched them direct the then live daily broadcast of Romper Room, the control room talk got a bit adult – they forgot I was in the booth.. Then I watched air checks of The Soupy Sales Show on an old VR-1000, I was hooked on what I perceived was the coolest job ever, not realizing it wasn’t all funny adult talk and Soupy…. 🙂

  17. Gary Walters

    Allied Radio, before it merged with Radio Shack, had a 12 in 1 tube amplified kit (Knight Kit) in the early 60’s. One of the 12 items, was a radio transmitter with a wire antenna. I souped it up and with an old record player and carbon mic, got a range on AM of about 1/2 mile.

  18. Mike Hale

    WOW! That is almost exactly my story as well. Never made it to TV, as I had a face for radio.

  19. Mike Medrano

    Love this. Is that a homemade “camera”?

  20. Tom Griggs

    These were made for children to play with while attending Vacation Bible School this past summer.

  21. Scott Comstock

    I didn’t play TV, but when I was 11, I took classes on TV production at SUNY Oneonta, which offered a series of Saturday enrichment classes to local schools. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience 🙂

  22. Gary Lewi

    it was amazing how tinkertoys could be made into ribbon mikes – as headsets they left something to be desired.

  23. Jay Phelps

    That is so funny. I also used the female plug on an extention cord and did interviews. But I was Bob Barker. I still haven’t given up on becoming him one day. 🙂

  24. Jim Grey

    I wanted to be a staff announcer too! I was born toward the end of that era, though, and by the time I was a teen those jobs were mostly gone.

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