Flight From Callahan County

 When I was a boy growing up in a rural part of the Big Country of West Texas in the 1950s, our one TV station had no live network programming for several years after it first signed on the air. The reason was the AT&T line (a coaxial cable) carrying network television service extended no farther westward than Dallas-Fort Worth. No football, no basketball, no baseball, no network news. When construction started to expand the service to the Abilene market, the station, KRBC-TV, began running a film promotional announcement with the words "the cable is coming to Abilene." I was reminded of that line yesterday when we had a Google Fiber hanger placed on our front door here in southwest Austin. Google Fiber hanger, promising free installation, unlimited data with no throttling or extra charges, more than enough Wi-Fi with no buffering or interruptions, TV and telephone service. Photo by Thom Milkovic on Unsplash . Door hanger scan . Austin has always been a limited-choice te...

Back when I was growing up on the Callahan County side of Scranton, Texas in the 1940s and 1950s, radio was the primary mass medium for most of that time. Local-service television did not arrive until 1953, and many farm families there did not immediately purchase TV sets because the small-screen, black-and-white receivers were expensive. The Federal Communications Commission began licensing TV stations after the end of World War II. However, because of unanticipated problems of interference and scarcity of frequency assignments, the FCC halted the authorization of new stations with the Freeze of 1948 . (Scroll FCC history page for more details.) At the start of the freeze, Dallas-Fort Worth, too far away for reliable service in Scranton, had television stations. Smaller markets like Abilene, 45 miles to the west of Scranton and the heart of the Big Country market, did not. The first folks to have a television set in our area were our neighbors, the Battles. Ray...