For most baby boomers, it really was the Golden Age of Television when cowboys and cops and variety shows ruled the airwaves. From the 1950s to the 70s we could watch classic TV shows such as Dragnet and Gunsmoke and Ed Sullivan and everything was good. There were actually morals to the story lines and we were glad to have shows like Andy Griffith and Father Knows Best to reinforce the values we thought were important. And there were never any commercials for sex pills that we had to watch while sitting on the couch with our grandparents.
Though we think life was easier back then, it wasn’t exactly always Disneyland and Lassie in real life. TV brought President Kennedy’s assassination and funeral, an Asian war that seemed to go on forever, and President Nixon’s resignation right into our living rooms. Segregation was the reality in many parts of the country, and the Cold War kept us on the edge of our seats. We sometimes escaped our worries by turning on the TV after dinner to fast moving comedy like Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, or a family friendly episode of Family Affair. We didn’t have the 200 cable choices, but instead depended on the major channels and PBS to provide quality programming.
TopTenRealEstateDeals.com invites you to remember the gentler times in media by showcasing some of the great shows of the past, the stars that we loved and the homes they lived in during the years of their TV shows’ popularity. Most of these stars had homes that were probably a little larger and nicer than our own homes but still had the warm patina of family life. Maybe we will be inspired to take one night a week where we turn off the cell phones and the computers and watch reruns of these great shows of yesteryear with our own families and regain a smidgen of the warmth, innocence and laughter of times past.
Art Linkletter had trained to be a teacher, so he had first-hand knowledge that kids say the darndest things. On a radio show he was hosting in the 1940s, he accidentally put on a recording he had made while interviewing his 5-year-old son Jack, thinking he had reached for music. Not expecting such ...
Not long into the talk show business, Merv Griffin realized what would sharpen the extra edge between a great talk show and a good talk show. The answer was control over choosing the guests. After many show runs, cancellations and disagreements over censorship with the network, Merv went into syndic...
Family Affair had a cute plot and appealed to kids of all ages. Brian Keith’s character, Bill Davis, was living the good bachelor life as a highly paid consulting engineer. He had a glamorous apartment and an English gentleman’s gentleman in the person of Giles French. All was f...
Film star Robert Taylor was born Spangler Arlington Brugh in 1911. After following his small town college music professor from Doane College in Crete, Nebraska to his new assignment at Pomona College in Los Angeles, Spangler Brugh was discovered by a studio scout when he performed in a college play....
Andy Rooney, newscaster extraordinaire, was one of the few newscasters we welcomed into our homes with open arms who felt like “family.” Producers of 60 Minutes were wise to put him on at the end, since many times if we didn’t have him to look forward to, many may have cha...
Derived from the rich imagination of Martin Caidin, who wrote the book "Cyborg", the television series The Six Million Dollar Man was created, starring Lee Majors. The series ran on ABC from 1974 through 1978. As the story goes, Lee’s character, Air Force Colonel Steve Austin, was an ...
When our parents were still listening to the tail end of Big Band music and the best Hi-Fi was still on reel tape, the infancy of Rock & Roll was beginning to take shape. Small transistor radios had just come on the market at an affordable price making music portable for the first time. Visionar...
The hippie years brought us one of the funniest comedy programs of all time. A take-off of our hippie love-ins and sit-ins, Laugh-In spoofed it all. From 1968 to 1973, and cleverly airing on Monday nights, it had us rolling on the floor in awe of the outrageous things they could get away wi...
The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour, or various forms thereof, ran on and off from 1971 through 1977 delivering their many hit songs and lively chatter into our living rooms. Remember how it opened with the theme song, started into "The Beat Goes On" and always ended with "I’ve Got You, ...
Carole King may not have had a regular TV series but she did have the #1 record album of the 1970s, and was a frequent guest on TV variety shows. One of the most popular and prolific songwriters of the baby boom years, Carole’s songs have wafted through our homes since her first Top 40 hit in ...
