Ah, the Days of Capital Cablevision

I think it was 1975, I’m not sure of the exact year or date.  At the time, I was living with my parents in Colonie, in one of those mobile home trailer parks that still dot Central  Avenue today.  I came home from school, expecting to watch whatever was on one of the four television channels we could get at the time – which were either predicated on WRGB, WTEN, WAST (as WNYT was known back then ) and WMHT.  6, 10, 13 or 17.  That was it.  You either watched Merv Griffin or Sesame Street or maybe some ancient rerun of Gilligan’s Island, or you went outside and played.

Well, at some point in our life, I came home and there was a new attachment to the television box.  It looked like a push-button device, with a choice of 15 buttons and a toggle switch.

I turned on the television.  WRGB came in much clearer, and there wasn’t any snow or distortion on the other channels.

Then I pressed the buttons on the box.  Suddenly I was watching cartoons from New York City on stations I never saw before, with call letters like WNEW and WPIX and WOR.  And I was also getting broadcasts from Boston, from WSBK, Channel 38.  Some of the other channels didn’t have television programs; they had what looked like electronic news teletypes, with baseball scores and political wrapups.  Another channel had an electronic bulletin board of community events.

Hokey Smokes.  I just discovered cable television.

This was huge in my household.  I immediately discovered that cable television opened up my world to dozens of new television shows that I never saw before.  And in some cases, could see at different times of the day.

WSBK and WNEW, for example, both showed the old 1950’s Mickey Mouse Club as part of their afternoon childrens programming.  Yeah, it was 20 years old, and yeah it was Disney, but the shows both aired at about 5pm – and you could flip back and forth between the two channels to see if they both aired at exactly the same time.  You could get Mickey Mouse to repeat, “Hi Kids! Hi Kids!” with a snap of the channel changer.  Yep, cable television as an early form of remixing and back-scratching.  And when WAST started airing the Mickey Mouse Club at 4pm, you could see where their airings were in comparison to WSBK’s and WNEW’s – at least two months behind.

Of course, all this joy in seeing the same show on two or three different channels was short-lived.  See, back then there was some rule called “Syndex,” which meant that if a local station had the rights to broadcast Batman on their station, and your cable box had channels that also broadcast Batman on their schedules, then Capital Cablevision had the right – and they enforced it – to “black out” the imported station’s airing of that show, so that you would only be able to see the local channel’s airing.  On the other channel – just a test pattern or digital snow.

This infuriated me – I’m a kid and I want to watch Batman any time it’s on, not when Capital Cablevision tells me I can watch it!  Of course, this “syndex blackout” rule made my stepfather sore as well; he wanted to watch the Red Sox games on WSBK, and if a game ran long – to the point where the station would have aired a blacked-out program in that time slot – then sure enough, the game would get blacked out at that exact time.  Not a fun moment in my household when that happened.  Still, sometimes there were “bonus days,” when something went wrong at Capital Cablevision and the blackout machine wouldn’t black anything out.  Those lasted for a few days, until Capital Cablevision fixed the glitch.

It was fun to experiment with the cable box as well.  for example, you could push down the button for channel 6 and get WRGB; but if you pushed the buttons for 5 and 7 at the same time, you could get WRGB with another station’s audio.  I can’t remember all the combinations, but I do remember they had to be manipulated so that only odd-numbered buttons or only even-numbered buttons pressed simultaneously would work.  And just in case you were wondering, it did take a while, but I figured out the combination to unscramble the scrambled channels and see those movies kids my age weren’t supposed to see.  All you have to do is

.

Real simple. It might still work today if you have one of those old converter boxes.

Before long, we got some more stations on our little box – channels like Nickelodeon and their 5-hour block of “Pinwheel” children’s programming.  We got the early ESPN, and all the wonderful episodes of Australian Rules Football and English soccer and Canadian football.  We picked up something called the Satellite Programming Network, which had one show I really enjoyed called Video Concert Hall, full of 1970’s music video clips.  Ah, the days  before MTV…

We did get Home Box Office back then, but it was just one channel – not 15 like today – and the technician actually had to climb a telephone pole to activate the signal for that channel.  Home Box Office had some great early programming, besides all the movies and such.  If a movie ran five minutes past the half hour, they filled the remaining 25 minutes with music videos (a show called “Video Jukebox”) or trailers for upcoming movies.

There was a Madison Square Garden channel back in the late 1970’s, and I thought that was cool as well.  Imagine a channel where one could watch not only Knicks and Rangers games, but also live wrestling events from the World’s Most Famous Arena.  And I could watch it at home, without having to go to New York City.

Those were the early days of cable television in the Capital District.  in addition to Capital Cablevision, there was also I think Schenectady Cablevision and Troy NewChannels, and some other outfitts as well.