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.
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.
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. 🙂
it was amazing how tinkertoys could be made into ribbon mikes – as headsets they left something to be desired.
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 🙂
These were made for children to play with while attending Vacation Bible School this past summer.
Love this. Is that a homemade “camera”?
WOW! That is almost exactly my story as well. Never made it to TV, as I had a face for radio.
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.
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…. 🙂
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.
Yes, but then it was called “Local Origination” by most cable companies. LOL.
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).
I used to tape record myself as a news announcer
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.
My TV genesis started with a marvelous book written by KOMO TV Engineer Dic Gardner called ” Be On TV”. I still have the book.
Yup! Mine wasn’t as elaborate as this though.
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.
I never got a shock from my Electrolux power cord mic, but it certainly scared my mom when she discovered it was plugged in.
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.
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.
Wow! I had to make do with poorly cut plywood scraps.
These photos are amazing Ken, can you tell us the year and any other details about the kids?
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.
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.