The Talking Picture Box

Three Dimensions

Inez and I had taken my parents, Bill and Jo, and my sister, Bubbles, to Fort Collins to visit Joel and his family while Dad attented a Treasurer's convention held there. The highlight of the trip would be a night at a hotel in Denver with dinner at Jack Cunningham's cafe and tickets to the very first three-dimensional movie to be shown in a Denver theater. Dad and I were more interested in visiting Cunningham's restaurant than seeing the movie, as Jack was a former boxer and Dad was acquainted with a few of the old pugilists from the days when Doc Diaz of San Luis had his own stable of boxers.

The theater hosting the movie was in the heart of Denver. We arrived early enough to be assured a parking space in a lot across the street from the entrance to the theater. We had popcorn and drinks as we passed an usher who handed each of us a throwaway pair of spectacles needed to enjoy the thrill of 3D and we had our pick of choice seats.

In a single word, this was "awesome" to the little backwoods family from Creede. We were right there, right in all the action and it was made more apparent when one of the actors threw a chair that was headed smack dab in our direction. Bubbles screamed, tried to jump out of the way, and spilled her coke over herself and her seat.

I wanted to leave then and there and get her cleaned up as I have always had a phobia about stickiness and I was sure the little gal was suffering both in embarrassment and with wet, sticky clothes. She and Inez were not about to leave the most exciting event of their lives so we stuck it out, literally, until the end.

That wasn't to be the end of our discomfort. We exited the theater on another street and were totally lost. It took over an hour of wandering, late at night, before we located the entrance to the theater and the parking lot to be reunited with our car. A safe haven in the big city.

Creede Tunes In

The first time I saw images projected on a television screen was in Cherryvale, Kansas, Christmas, 1951. I had driven Inez back to her old hometown to visit her parents over the holidays. To say I was dumbstruck was an understatement as I followed that small, flat, brown wire from the rear of the set through a hole in the wall of the living room and up, with a curl each foot, to an antenna that was pointed in the direction of Coffeyville, Kansas where the signal originated, or so they said.

It was early morning and the family was watching a western group playing and singing, between local commercials, from a studio in Coffeyville. A fellow they called "Shorty" played a fiddle and did most of the talking. "Wait until 5:00 this evening and we can get the news" advised Inie's dad, Paul Schriver. "It even gives the weather and you'll know if it's snowing in Creede." I was witnessing a miracle, a picture show on a twenty one inch screen coming through that little brown wire from an assortment of aluminum tubes. They couldn't understand why I was so puzzled by this metal box of tubes and wires. Hell, I was still in awe of a telephone that brought voices to us through wires and all I ever dreamed of owning in electronics was a nine-tube radio set as good as the one my Dad bought from Montgomery Ward Company in 1934. If circumstances permitted it, I would have a 78 RPM phonograph on the same table as the radio.

We were hooked. Entertainment brought into your own living room where you could eat popcorn, drink sodas and go to the bathroom without missing anything but a commercial. No more small talk with company, just switch on the television set and see that their bowls were kept full of popcorn.

It would be ten years before viewable signals graced Creede, Colorado and the credit for the first snowy images belongs to Gene "Pat" Patten and Leo "Hoot" Moore who jumped in a Jeep every evening after work and scouted the high places with a generator and small set. It took a lot of time and patience on their part but eventually they zeroed in on a site between Windy Gulch and Sunnyside where they could pick up a weak signal from San Antonio Mountain near Antonito, Colorado from a receiver that relayed signals to the San Luis Valley originating in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Lloyd Clark of Pagosa Springs was enlisted to bring in the new, refined equipment and fine tune Creede's own receiver for the first snow-free pictures. He had to first set up a relay station near South Fork to boost the signals.

We were ecstatic! Local donations and the ingenuity of Pat, Hoot, and Lloyd had provided us with winter time entertainment and Soapies for the widows and wives to cry with instead of the all-consuming gossip that filtered from one end of town to the other when there was nothing better to do than haggle over the back fence.

Pat and Hoot told us at the dry room of the Commodore mine that they had picked up a signal with good sound and images that, while not identifiable, could be seen moving on the screen. Les Turnipseed was certain, after talking with Pat, that if he could get an antenna high enough at his home in Creede he would be the first person in the town to be sitting on his couch watching shows. He traveled to the valley, bought a television set and the best long range antenna available, then began gathering up steel pipe and reducers. When he had forty feet or more of two-inch pipe reduced to one and one half inch, to one inch and finally to one half inch resting on sawbuck stands so he could attach the antenna on the end he called on me, Kenny Swinehart, Floyd Dooley, and Gene Wardell to help. He had all in order to attach the pipe to his house in a corner by the porch. would get on the roof, the rest of us would raise the pipe and antenna to him and he would tie it securely with heavy gauge wire already in place. That was a very unwieldy assemblage of metal but we were all strong. Kenny and Gene were tall enough to go over Floyd's and my hands for the final push that slapped the pipe against the house just as a gust of wind hit and twirled the antenna. We were overpowered and the whole shebang came crashing down shattering the antenna and scattering pieces of aluminum tubing clear across the street.