Yeah... that was the notion being floated around. I think that and flouridation of drinking water was a communist plot or some such nonsense. My mom wouldn't let me sit closer than 10ft from the TV. Good thing I'm farsighted.
That thing came loaded into what amounted to a big assed cabinet. No wheels on that bad boy either. Once we set it down, that was home for it until moving day 20 years later. Thank goodness we were living in a roomy Co-op instead of a tenement apt.
Hmmm, I'm not sure they even made 27" color TV's yet. Most people had 19" or 20" screens. I'm throwing my challenge flag ; ) Sony 27". console TV. By 1969, they were pretty new, and pretty dang large.
OK January 12, 1969. I was 12 years old. Uncles and Father are died in the wool Giants fans who despise Joe Willie. Myself, my cousins and my sister are all rooting hard for Broadway Joe & the Jets. Father Mestice (a Giant fan) didn't mention the game at Mass that morning. (He mentioned the Packers the year before!!) That was the only bet I lost that day. By 300pm we were all settled in front of Grandma's Zenith color TV. Not 27 inches (maybe 23?) but it was a huge piece of furniture. I'll never forget how happy [half the room ] was when Snell powered over in the 2nd Quarter. A little nervous when Johnny U came in (the Father/Uncle contingent was whooping it up, but it didn't help). The Jets got the ball back up 16-7 with about 3 minutes left. In the first game of the season, with a one-point lead, the Jets killed the last 7 minutes with a ball control drive against the Chiefs. They almost did it again. After the game, I remember seeing Namath push a microphone away from his face in the post game locker room. The next morning, I walked to the corner store and bought the SUPERDUPER version of the Daily News that Champ uses as his avatar. I know I have it somewhere!
I didn't become a Jets fan till the year after. Saw the Jets play the Giants in the Yale Bowl in preseason. Don't know how but somehow I and many fans were looking into the Jets locker room. No security and I saw Namath, Winston Hill and Little Eddie Bell. SB 4 was the first one I watched on TV and the Chiefs dominated the Vikes.
Yeah I don't remember Sony making TV then. It was Magnavox, Zenith and no way it was 27 inch unless it was as a console which was like added furniture that took up huge space.
I should have seen it, but didn't. I was attending college in Mexico. I knew the game was being played, but we didn't have access to a TV and I'm not sure if it was telecast down there, American Football not being very popular in Mexico at the time. I think everyone just assumed the Colts would win. I remember being approached by a few classmates, who knew I was from NY, the day after to offer congratulations. Missed the Super Bowl, but I did get to attend the 1968 Olympics a few months earlier.
I was 13 years old, and watched the game with my family (parents and older sister), and two aunts, two uncles, and three cousins from my mother's side of the family at my aunt and uncle's house in Fort Lee, NJ. My cousins, sister, aunts, and one uncle didn't care about football. The other uncle was a Giants fan, and told me before the game that the Jets were going to get killed, and I told him to shut up. My mother then yelled at me for 15 minutes for disrespecting her brother. Ultimately my mother, father, and I (all gigantic Jets fans) were the only ones who watched the game. I'm not going to say that I knew the Jets were going to win, but I was absolutely positive that they would at least be very competitive. It was obvious to anyone with eyes that Earl Morrall couldn't be taken seriously; JWN was absolutely correct when he said that there were at least 4 or 5 QBs in the AFL better than he was (Namath, Lamonica, Dawson, and Hadl were all vastly better than Morrall, and even Griese in his second season might have been better), and I knew that the Jets front 7 would make things very uncomfortable for him. Since I was never an NFL fan (I got interested in football in 1965 with the Jets, and was always a 100% AFL fan) the legend of Unitas didn't scare me, but I wasn't thrilled when they pulled Morrall only because I knew Morrall was clearly not going to beat the Jets (which is why Shula pulled him, of course - he knew it too). When the game was over and I was done jumping up and down and screaming, my uncle came to me and said "Congratulations - you obviously know a lot more about football than I do." That feeling was almost as good as the one I got from the Jets winning. September 1968 was the beginning of a 20-month run that was pretty much perfection for 13/14-year-old sports fan. The Jets win a miracle Super Bowl, the Mets win a miracle World Series, and the Knicks overcome an injury to the star captain to win an NBA title. I only got to see the Super Bowl live, since I was in school when the Mets won the World Series (games were played during the day, but in every classroom teachers let students have transistor radios on so everyone could listen to the game), and had to listen to the Knicks-Lakers game 7 on the radio (home playoff games weren't televised until the following year), so it's special among the three.
As I just said in my story, not at all for me - my parents were both big Jets fans. They were big Knicks fans and big Mets fans also (growing up my father was a Brooklyn Dodgers fan and my mother was a New York Giants fan, so the only thing they agreed on was that they hated the Yankees; there was never any question that ours was a Mets house from 1962 on). My parents and I also had Islanders season tickets for 17 years, and saw together every one of the 19 consecutive playoff series they won. No mixed feelings in my family - we were 100% on the same side. I absolutely agree, however, about the AFL's appeal as the young and cool league. That definitely appealed to me, and I guess it appealed to my folks, too!
No doubt. 17" was the biggest one that we had. And they came with a manual channel changer (us) and probably weighed as much as a refrigerator...
We got our color TV (a Quasar by Motorola) for the 1968 Olympics. It was all transistor, and the instant-on property was almost as amazing as the color (yes, youngsters, it used to be that televisions had to "boot up" just like computers!). They were definitely still unusual in the late 1960s. Bunny ears really weren't good enough to get good reception - my father immediately put up an external antenna on the roof when we got the color TV. The only reason I agreed to go to my aunt and uncle's house in Fort Lee the day of Super Bowl III is that they also had a color TV with an external antenna.
There is a guy from my home state who played DE for the colts in Super bowl III--Ordell Bracey. He has been interviewed a few times about the game and always says that he thinks Namath should NOT have been named MVP--he said it should have gone to Matt Snell. Not saying I agree with Bracey, but one could make the case that Snell's running had a lot to do with outcome. Namath did not throw a fourth quarter pass in Super bowl III.
This is something many people have said in hindsight, but I can tell you that no one complained about Namath winning it at the time. Snell was great, but it was the brilliant game plan that made it all possible, not outstanding individual effort on his part (he averaged 4 yards per carry). This game was all about the perfect execution of a plan and the belief of the Jets that they could, and would, win, and that came from Namath. It's also important to remember that back then people cared far less about statistics for an award like that than they do now, and far more about who was viewed as the guy who "led" the team to victory (whatever that meant). In Super Bowl I Max McGee caught 7 passes for 138 yards and 2 TDs, but Bart Starr won the MVP. In Super Bowl IV Len Dawson was 12/17 for 142 yards with 1 TD and 1 INT, and he won the MVP even though the Chiefs defense forced six turnovers and was clearly the reason for the win. I would guess that the vast majority of people who saw the game think that Namath deserved the MVP, and certainly thought so at the time.
We were one of the first families on our block to have a color TV. Maybe the first. I'm not sure what year it was, but it was definitely before 1971. They were just starting to broadcast TV shows in color. NBC had a peacock before each color show to let you know. It was a big deal to have a color TV in the middle class Bronx. We'd invite our friends over if they still had B&W. I remember that we had to have a guy come in to set it up, and wave a wand around it to Degauss it. That became my word for a while. I also remember cutting up the box to put it in garbage bags. My dad didn't want to put the whole box out for garbage. He was afraid that it would make people think we had money, ir we were showing off, and they would rob our house. I still do that to this day.
