Take an afternoon drive around an urban or suburban area anywhere in the Midwest. Look at the houses. What is missing from these homes that would likely have been there 50 years ago?

Give up?

How about a television antenna?

Fifty years ago you would have found a television antenna on most residential rooftops. The advent of cable television initiated the disappearance of the rooftop antenna. Then satellite receivers took even more. When commercial broadcast TV went digital in 2009 the new technology eliminated the need for some rooftop antennas. Nowadays internet streaming makes even more rooftop antennas unnecessary.

Where you still see TV antennas, often mounted on towers, are in rural areas distant from broadcast antennas.

So who pays attention to the gradual disappearance of rooftop TV antennas? Only nerds like me. I’ve long had an interest in television and radio broadcasting, including the technical side.

When my father purchased the family’s first television from his brother-in-law for five bucks on New Years Day 1957 we had no antenna on our roof. That night as we tried to get a picture on the cheap table-top set, our neighbor fashioned an indoor antenna from a length of flat television lead-in wire arranged into what looked like a T. A few years later I learned this was a simple dipole antenna. It worked for the TV station about 25 miles from our home but not for the other two network stations about 50 miles away.

Several weeks later Dad popped for a real rooftop antenna and we could watch all three stations in our market. His four sons were excited and pleased.

Family finances had begun to tighten, however, and the job of maintaining his sons’ favorite entertainment began shifting to his nerdy oldest son — that’s me.

Our family moved frequently and when we moved to a town in far northwest Iowa our home did not have a rooftop antenna and I knew we did not have money to have one installed. Early on I was in a hardware store where I noticed an indoor antenna commonly known as “rabbit ears.” Understanding that this would not be a father-financed investment, I dug deep into my mostly empty pockets and purchased the antenna.

When I hooked it up at home our TV picked up only one channel but that was better than no stations and life went on.

A few years later we moved into a house with a rooftop antenna but it was beat up. Several elements were missing and I couldn’t find a lead-in wire.

Walking home from school a few weeks later I spotted an old beat-up TV antenna in a pile of junk next to a garage. I knocked on the door of the adjacent home and a few minutes later walked away with the antenna … free of charge.

From a mail-order catalog I purchased what I needed to mount and hook up the antenna. While waiting for those parts, I rebuilt the antenna, straightened out bent elements, tightened and replaced screws and by the time the parts arrived the antenna was in acceptable condition.

When I connected the antenna to our old RCA console TV it received all three stations in our market. On several occasions that old antenna brought in a station from 100 miles away in northeast Missouri.

In those days some families of our acquaintance considered television to be sinful. An older woman in our community maintained that if there was a TV antenna on the roof there was a devil in the house. With her brood of six kids, I’m sure there were times when my mother might have thought that to be true.

As a young adult I tried to earn a few bucks installing TV antennas. That effort was put to a quick end when I nearly fell off a roof with an eave at least 15 feet above a concrete driveway. That incident was so traumatic I had difficulty working on roofs thereafter.

Over the years, however, I always made sure my family had a TV antenna adequate to bring in a solid signal. What I learned in those early years scavenging for antennas with little or no budget helped me do a good job with a small budget.

Poverty is a crappy lifestyle but it sure is a good teacher.

Arvid Huisman can be contacted at huismaniowa@gmail.com. ©2025 by Huisman Communications.