Many people today cannot remember (or imagine) a time when a television set was not a familiar item in most homes. I can.

I was nearly 9 years old when our family acquired its first television receiver. My father made the purchase on New Year’s Day 1957.

To put this in perspective, younger folks, this was even more exciting than the first time you surfed the internet.

Until that memorable New Year’s Day, Dad seemed reluctant to have a television in our home. He feared, I suspect, that his sons would be exposed to inappropriate things on TV. He didn’t know I was already looking at the lingerie pages of the Sears catalogs.

We spent that New Year’s Day with Uncle Bob and Aunt Annie at their farm home south of Eldora. As we were about to leave for home I excitedly watched my father purchase a used TV for five bucks from Uncle Bob and load it into the trunk of the family Ford.

The half-hour drive home seemed to take hours. While Mom prepared supper, we unloaded the bulky table-top TV from the car and placed it on a library table in the living room. Dad draped some antenna lead-in wire over a curtain rod, connected it to the receiver and turned it on.

It took a while for the tubes to warm up but we eventually saw “snow” on the screen. While that was encouraging we knew there had to be more.

Mom insisted we stop for supper. After a quick meal, Dad fiddled with the controls some more. Finally, getting nothing more than “snow” — sometimes rolling vertically, sometimes flipping horizontally — Dad gave up and called our neighbor, Udell.

Udell, who owned a TV store in town, became our hero as he fashioned a makeshift dipole antenna from lead-in wire and made some minor adjustments. Suddenly there was a picture on the screen — WOI-TV from Ames was coming in!

Udell fine-tuned the picture just as the Wyatt Earp Show was beginning. There was Hugh O’Brien as Wyatt Earp, just as the theme song described him: “brave, courageous and bold.” I don’t recall what else we watched that night but I won’t forget Wyatt Earp.

In the days that followed, my brothers and I rushed home from school each afternoon to watch television. We became aware, however, the $5 receiver had its faults — the picture would flip and flop and it wasn’t as bright as it could be. And, of course, it received only one station.

One noon in February I walked home from school for lunch (we called it “dinner” then) and noticed a new TV antenna on our house. Great, I thought, now we can watch more than one station.

Imagine my surprise when I walked into the house to discover a different TV in the living room. Dad had traded the old table model for a like-new used RCA console TV at Udell’s store.

I turned it on and was delighted to find that it received two Des Moines stations as well as WOI from Ames. That afternoon the Huisman boys watched WHO-TV’s Slim Hayes, dressed in cowboy duds and hailing from what he called the Lucky 13 Ranch. As the months passed we became hooked on Bill Riley’s KRNT (now KCCI) Breakfast Club. We watched Betty Lou, Gregory and Dusty on WOI’s Magic Window and were thrilled when Betty Lou announced our birthdays. We also watched the Mickey Mouse Club each afternoon and Saturdays brought us Howdy Doody, Mighty Mouse, Fury, Roy Rogers, Sky King and a host of other great programs.

The television set enhanced our family’s social life, too. Whenever a Billy Graham crusade was televised, friends and relatives who didn’t yet have a television in their home would come to watch. I have always believed that if it weren’t for Billy Graham, Dad may never have purchased a TV.

Television brought the world into our homes, providing entertainment and education. TV programming has changed over the decades and, unfortunately, an increasing amount of it today is trash. There’s still some decent programming out there, of course, but I miss Wyatt Earp and Sky King … and Penny.

A new TV in the house. In 1957 that was an exciting day!

Arvid Huisman can be contacted at huismaniowa@gmail.com. ©2025 by Huisman Communications.