Flashback: Channel 13

    My folks bought our first television set in 1954, when I was seven. It was a black-and-white Admiral with a 17" screen and a rabbit-ears antenna. 
    I don't remember what the first movie was I watched on it. Probably some B western from a previous decade. Sunset Carson or early John Wayne. One of the local stations would show those things on weekdays in the late afternoon, prime time for schoolboys like me who had just gotten home: too early for supper to be ready, but not too early to put off doing your homework. 
    The Three Stooges took over that time slot eventually and I watched a lot of their movies, too, the raft of two-reelers they cranked out at Columbia in the '30s and '40s. I even liked the ones with Shemp in them, but I might've been in the minority there. 
    There were Disney movies on Sunday nights sometimes, and I probably caught some of the films my parents were watching, but I don't really remember them. 
    The most significant cinematic discovery the Admiral and I made together, the one that affected my entire movie-watching life, was Channel 13 in Rockford, Illinois. All television signals were subject to atmospherics back then - no cable, no satellites - and the only time we could pull in Channel 13 in Madison was real late at night. Even then, the picture was never very clear, obscured by what we called "snowballs" - interference due to the distance that prevented a decent picture from coming in. 
    Channel 13 showed the best old movies. I first saw "The Bride of Frankenstein" in Channel 13. And "Tarzan and His Mate". Spencer Tracy in "Men of Boys Town". Barbara Stanwyck in "Lady of Burlesque". I watched Henry Fonda risk his life as a lineman in "Slim", and Jimmy Stewart do his lonely filibuster in "Mr. Smith Goes To Washington", and Jimmy Cagney go screaming to the electric chair in "Angels With Dirty Faces". Not very daring by later standards maybe, but not exactly kids' movies, either. They had an edge to them and I was intrigued by that. I was hooked. 
    If there's a moment I could point to when my life-long love for motion pictures began, that was it: at the age of 10 or 11, staying up till the wee hours all by myself, watching Boris Karloff and Johnny Weissmuller through the snowballs on Channel 13. 
    Looking back on it now, I don't know why my parents even let me do that. But I'm glad they did.