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Former Potsdam resident reminisces on tech changes since 1950s

Posted 3/20/16

By SANDRA PAIGE SORRELL When we first moved to Potsdam in 1953 after my father had accepted a position in the Humanities Dept. at Clarkson (then “College”), we lived at 17 Pleasant St. (at the …

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Former Potsdam resident reminisces on tech changes since 1950s

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By SANDRA PAIGE SORRELL

When we first moved to Potsdam in 1953 after my father had accepted a position in the Humanities Dept. at Clarkson (then “College”), we lived at 17 Pleasant St. (at the corner of Waverly) on the second floor of an old two-family house.

It was a dark brick house with an upstairs porch that was sagging and threatened to fall off at any moment. This is where my mother bravely stepped out and hung our laundry to dry. (We had no dryer then.) My parents were proud of their rental home which boasted a brand new shiny linoleum floor in the kitchen. I remember they purchased a gray Formica and chrome table with red vinyl and chrome chairs to show off the kitchen to its fullest. This is the house where I got my very own maple bedroom set purchased at Sperlings Furniture off Market Street -- a solid set that I used into adulthood.

Televisions were just becoming popular and a few of our friends had them, but basically they were scarce commodities. I badgered my parents continually for one of these new and exciting inventions that would bring far-reaching exotic places into our own living room.

Although we had no TV in our own home, we were fortunate to live upstairs from a young lawyer named Robert Halliday (later to become Judge Halliday) and his gorgeous wife Gloria. They had two cute sons about my age. I thought Mrs. Halliday was rather exotic and Bohemian as she wore toreador pants (comparable to today’s leggings) and high turtlenecks usually in black. The Hallidays were a striking couple by any and all standards. That aside, the most attractive thing about the Halliday house to me was their TV.

Occasionally they would take pity on me and ask me downstairs to watch some program like a Perry Como Christmas special. I looked forward to these visits with great anticipation. Then one day I discovered color and wow! -- TVs were taken to a whole new level. The color came from some type of clear plastic the Hallidays had purchased that stuck magically to the front of the TV screen, resulting in a faint tinge of color. Faces could have been green or blue, but it was color never the less.

A year or so later my mother went to work as an itinerant physical education teacher serving the many one-room schoolhouses in the outlying districts surrounding Potsdam. (Later consolidation took place with the building of the Lawrence Avenue Elementary School.)

Mom would visit each school once a week to bring them physical education programs, taking my little sister along to save on babysitting expenditures. As a result we had a little extra money, and with a lot of pleading from me, our first new major purchase was a light blond wood console TV. We had arrived! It was unbelievable! The TV was a monstrous thing with two knobs on the front one for on/off and volume and the other for changing channels.

The trouble was we only got one channel -- channel 7 from Carthage (beginning in 1954) and, if it was a clear, cold winter night, we might also receive a station from Montreal with the broadcast in French. Programming was not 24 hours a day then. There was a sign-off late at night showing an American flag waving on the screen with our national anthem playing in the background. Programming resumed sometime in the morning.

TV opened up a whole new world for us bringing shows like Disneyland, Gene Autry, Jack Benny, the Jackie Gleason Show, Death Valley Days, and Hopalong Cassidy. There were also lots of sports broadcasts back then. My favorite was wrestling, and my favorite wrestler was Gorgeous George with the golden locks. George was world-famous in those days very flamboyant and guaranteed to entertain with his antics (with some real wrestling occasionally mixed in).

I loved Saturday mornings as my little sister and I would get up early before my parents and grab a box of cereal from one of the new variety packs they were selling at Loblaws, then take a knife and slit the perforations on the top, pour in the milk, and eat our cereal from the boxes adult-like as we watched Sky King or Sergeant Preston of the Yukon. We also loved Tom Terrific, who with his wonder dog Mighty Manfred, got into all sorts of adventures as they battled the evil Crabby Appleton.

There was also a show called Winky Dink where we had a special piece of plastic and markers bought specifically for the show. The plastic stuck to the TV screen via static electricity and we were able to draw on it to create a means of escape for Winky when he needed to be rescued from his pursuers. Winky kept kids across the country frantically drawing bridges or ladders crossing ravines and streams. It was great fun (and also very unsophisticated by today’s standards). But we loved it! It was new and it was exciting!

Some of the programming on Channel 7 wasn’t too good to say the least, especially a local show with a huge man who sang “On the Sunny Side of the Street” and danced with an umbrella in his hand. I think his name was Ward Hamilton. There was also a character named Danny Burgess back in those days who had a show on Saturday mornings. We never missed the show.

Televisions were not thin and light with crystal clear pictures and sound like today. They were big, bulky pieces of furniture which generally required an outside antennae to be mounted on the roof (it soon became a status symbol to have one perched on your rooftop) or “Rabbit Ears” which were placed on top of the TV and could be maneuvered to pick up the best reception. (Wadding some tin foil on the tips of the ears sometimes helped to bring in a station.)

TVs were tricky and some required several adjustments during the course of a show--usually to correct a rolling or unfocused picture. There were no remote controls back then, so each glitch required you to get out of your comfortable chair and manually adjust the vertical hold or some other button on the TV. Imagine that? If the problem persisted, there were a couple of TV repair shops in town you could call. Heaven forbid your picture tube blew! That was catastrophic and meant big money. TVs caused other unanticipated problems too. Our cat Cuffy used the TV to sharpen his claws on the rough burlap-like fabric that covered the speakers.

Early television was also part of our academic life at the Congdon Campus Elementary School on Main Street. Teachers were as fascinated as we were by the new technology and anxious to take advantage of it. One of our classmates who lived just up the street had a TV, and our teacher would walk our class to his house where we would gather around and watch with fascination and incredulity as Mr. Wizard conjured up his magic, performing scientific experiments that helped us understand how science was related to ordinary things we saw in our everyday lives. The show was a bit hit at the time and the TV made learning fun.

When we lived on Pleasant Street, we had another encounter with early technology in the form of the telephone. We had a black dial phone (table model) with a wire-like cord covered with fabric. We had a party line and we often had to wait while the folks we shared the line with finished their conversation. Listening in on those conversations was fun for us kids, but boring after a few minutes of “old lady” talk.

When we moved to Diaper Hill (the Clarkson faculty housing complex which was across the street from the not-yet-built “Hill” campus) a couple of years later, we got a new phone that was mounted on the wall in the kitchen. It was a black rotary phone and our number was 4483. At some point in the 1950s Potsdam residents were given the prefix (exchange) “CO7.” “CO” stood for “Colony.”

My grand-nephew asked me the other day why I say “dial” the phone. He couldn’t believe it when I described what the old phones were like. Even push button phones were not around yet. You always hoped your best friend wouldn’t have a zero in their telephone number as dialing a zero required the rotary to do almost a full circle which seemed to take forever when you were anxiously waiting to dial the next digit.

Other new electronics during the mid-fifties included the record player that allowed you to stack up a couple of 45 records, pull the arm over on top of the stack, so that one record would drop down when one finished. Prior to that we could only put on one record at a time. It was placed on a plastic circular disk in the center of the turntable, requiring you to get up and put a new record on the player each time one finished.

The transistor radio was also a big thing and allowed radios to become portable. We always took my olive and dark green RCA transistor to Postwood Park, so we could listen to music while lying on a blanket soaking up the North Country’s precious bit of sun.

Kodak Brownie cameras big, boxy, and heavy were all the rage. The trouble came when you had to open the camera and insert the film into a spindle-like device to get it started, so it would advance with every picture you took. After the roll was finished, you removed it and took it to B.O. Kinneys to be developed. Then you waited in agony for a week until you got a call that your pictures were ready for pick up.

Calculators and computers were not around yet, and I remember seeing Clarkson students (almost all male) with slide rules swinging from their belts as they walked across the bridges toward Snell Hall and the downtown campus. The freshman wore “beanies” then. They were green and gold caps with a small visor.

Back in the 1950s, the Information Age was just beginning. It was an exciting time to be growing up with new gadgets and inventions being introduced to the public almost daily. Then, of course, the pace escalated until today we find countless new technologies supposedly making our lives simpler, safer, and easier.

But there is also a down side which the young people of today will never understand. The new technologies give, but they also take away. Ironically, while we have Facebook and Twitter, texting, and email to instantly connect us, we have at the same time distanced ourselves from one another. The world is a little less personal and more remote. The art of conversation and the ability to write coherent sentences in proper English may be dying a slow death. We will not know in our lifetime what price we will pay for the new technologies and what we will have lost because of them.

I am reminded of Joni Mitchell, one of my idols since the 1960s, who wisely sang in “Both Sides Now”: Something’s lost but something’s gained in living every day.

Sandra Paige Sorrell is a former Potsdam resident now living in Delmar