Television Comes to Callahan County
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...