I might've told this tale here, so bear with me if I did. The first in our neighborhood - I believe it was in '66, give or take a year - to get a color TV were our next door neighbors. Now, in our gathering of folk on Polish Hill, only the kind of people who lived "on da nor't side," particularly the part of Waldo Boulevard close to Lake Michigan, had the price and prestige to own one. It was simply unheard of in our community with things like Pulaski Park and Polish Phil's Bar. As my dad would say, stuff like color TV's, dishwashers, automatic clothes washers (not to mention dryers), power lawn-mowers, snow-blowers and any type of air-conditioning was for "da fancy people." So when our neighbors: grandpa; grandma; son; daughter-in-law; their daughter, and their son (my best friend at that time, also a lover of spooky movies and shows) purchased one, it was the most talked-about news until the moon landing about three years later.
There was a reason for the purchase. As expected in a neighborhood comprised primarily of people of Polish, Galician, and Czech ("Bohemian") people with last names that looked like a line on an eye chart, the vast majority were of the Catholic religion. The massive, two-steepled-with-onion-dome-tops church along with its campus of school, convent and rectory dominated half-a-block. On TV that year, it was announced that the classic film, The Song of Bernadette, would be aired for the first time. The older, pre-boomer generation all remembered seeing it in the theater 20-or-so-years earlier and recalled with pride that Jennifer Jones, who played the visionary, won the Oscar. In the mid-seventies, she would be remember for dancing with Fred Astaire before plunging over 1,000 feet to her death in The Towering Inferno. Now it was going to be on TV in all its 20th-Century-Fox glory. Even a visit by the pope wouldn't have caused such an uproar. So, just because of that occasion, the neighbors bought a set and invited everyone within a multi-block radius to come over (everyone brought something - that potluck thing, you know), and the party began. The time of the airing arrived, everyone settled down to watch this ultimate Catholic classic on color television until it started...
...and all the original viewers had forgot that it was filmed in black-and-white. Well, a good time was had by all. Being an epic, it took three hours for it to air and we kids who had to be in bed long before nine on a school night got to stay up until ten.
That set did get good use, though. We'd be invited over to watch something in color and I even got to see - are you ready for this, MB? - Lost In Space in color in the second and third seasons. The big thing to watch was Disney's Wonderful World of Color. One that stood out was Pablo and the Dancing Chihuahua. After awhile, the novelty wore off. It would be another ten years before my dad capitulated even to the demands of my mom and we became one of "da fancy people" and got our first set in 1976. The reason why (and my mom's primary insistence)? Gone With the Wind was going to air for the first time on TV.
And this time we knew it was in color.
Gerard