The Pecan Park Eagle

On Saturday morning, or late Saturday afternoon,  January 1, 1949, a few thousand residents of the Greater Houston Area awoke from their celebrations of the previous evening under the impression that the big party was now over again for another year. They were partly right. And partly wrong.

A little change was scheduled for that date. It would start quietly, but it would soon enough alter all our lives forever, from the way we get our news to the way we seek out entertainment, from the way we organize our personal lives to the way we interact with others.

Television was coming to Houston at 5:15 PM, CST, on Saturday, January 1, 1949, and, even though few of us realized it at the time, nothing we could possibly experience would ever again be quite the same. It was a rainbow on perspective that first came to us only literally in black and white, but that would change with advancements in technology that now collide in so many dazzling far-reaching ways with advances in digital microchip technology that we now associate with all our varied, always growing uses of simulated reality over the Internet.

Back in 1888, my grandfather was a 22-year-old one-man band owner, writer, and editor of a little newspaper in South Texas known as The Beeville Bee. Without a telegraph connection to the outside world, he had to rely upon mail reports and new people passing through town for information on all events beyond the township. With the coming of Western Union that year, grandfather wrote with unbridled joy: “The telegraph lines have been fully completed and Beeville is now in total connection with the outside world.”

Grandfather was technically right, but visitors to Beeville in 2013 might be willing even now to argue the point of Beeville’s “total connection with the outside world.” Some old backwaters don’t stir so easy, but grandfather would have been there all the way, working for the cause of the little guy, if he were still around. And he would have relished being wired to the Internet in service to that purpose.

All of us have some bead on the earlier generations in our families who would have loved or hated the explosion of change that began with the telegraph, telephone, radio, television, and now the computer sciences, but how many of us were awake to the scope of change that would soon enough follow the little back and white picture box that fairly quickly found its way into every American home? It started so quietly.

Here’s how the Galveston Daily News used three one-sentence paragraphs on Saturday, January 1, 1949 to announce the coming of television that day to Houston:

————————————————————–

Houston to Get First Television Saturday

Houston, Dec. 31, (AP) – Television comes to Houston at 5:15 p.m. Saturday with the formal opening of KLEE-TV.

W. Albert, owner of the station, estimates that there are 2,000 television sets in Houston.

First program to be televised here will be a musical show.

—————————————————————-

Wonder what the musical show was. Maybe it was “Dancing with the Stars.”