KING-TV of Seattle, WA, went on the air in November 1948 (five years after I was born), Parsons was the only one in town able to see television. According to MSNBC's Bob Sullivan, Parsons charged a $125 one-time set-up fee and a $3 a month service fee. In May 1968, Parsons was acknowledged as the father of community antenna television. I must have been born to get in the business.
Fabulous friend who called me one day and asked me if I was ready to go back to work? I needed a job to get a loan, so I said, sure! Doug had Lee Mulberry, the VP of Sales for Reliable Electric, out of Franklin Park, Illiois, call me to set up a meeting in Seattle. We met, and it went so well that he bought a round trip ticket for me to go to the factory for final interviews.
Within a week, I was flying to Illinois to meet with the entire sales force.
Doug and I were equally happy and had fun during my indoctrination week. This began my introduction to the Communications Industry. Reliable was very well-known manufacturer of outside plant equipment housings and various other innovative products. They had an excellent reputation in the Telephone side of the business, with a separate sales force.
Doug and I were assigned to the CATV (Cable Television Community Access Television or Community Antenna Television) side of the business, a much smaller part of the industry at the time. At that time, the cable television business was still growing, but very political. Learning the business was complex, I needed to learn the technology, like how the cable companies gathered and then delivered their various television channels to each home.
Coaxial cable - What's the big deal?
So, it began, CATV companies were offering all of the local stations and many new channels that couldn’t be seen using your antenna. TV channels that were much clearer. TV could now be seen by those living in remote areas not able to get any TV channels with their antennas. By the late 1960s, nearly all of the areas of the U.S. that could benefit from a community antenna had been served. Growth in the cable industry all but stopped.
This gets pretty technical, but I will attempt to keep it interesting. Since we all use this technology, it pays to know a little about it, I think.
In most CATV systems, off-air signals were not available or were very weak because of the terrain or the distance of the receiver from television transmitters. In some areas, such as New York City, multiple signal reflections and shadows cast by buildings made reception difficult. In both of these environments, a hard-wire method of delivery of signals to subscribers was welcomed. The first operators of these systems were retail TV receiver dealers who sought to expand the market for the sale of their products by also providing the signals that the products required.
Why did they need enclosures for their electronic equipment and what did the equipment do?
I can remember like it was yesterday, the first time I was taken on tour of the factory. I was amazed at the size of the machinery that was needed to stamp out the pre-galvanized steel parts that then were put on huge conveyors and dipped in special paint to both look good, fight off ultra violet sun rays and nasty weather conditions, including heat that could build up in them and ultimately cause problems for the cable company equipment.
"The true legacy of the cable industry isn’t measured by the miles of coaxial lines or fiber-optic glass we put in the ground, but by the walls of isolation we broke down along the way. We began with a single, fragile antenna on a rainy Seattle hilltop, built simply to pluck a lone, static-filled television signal out of the air and bring it to a handful of homes. From that lone spark of connectivity, we spent decades orchestrating an infrastructure revolution. We transformed that humble, single-purpose wire into a multi-lane digital superhighway—giving rise to the modern era of high-speed streaming, instant global video communication, smart-home automation, and virtual workplaces that the world now relies on every single day.
For the customer today, this evolution translates into pure, tangible freedom. It means the elimination of the old, rigid television schedule, replacing it with the power to stream any movie, show, or live event instantly in breathtaking 4K clarity on any device, anywhere in the home. It means a single, robust connection that effortlessly runs an entire household—allowing parents to work seamlessly via video conference, children to attend virtual classrooms, and smart security systems to protect the property simultaneously without a single second of lag. It has turned our homes from isolated structures into hyper-connected sanctuaries of entertainment, productivity, and peace of mind.
But our greatest transformation lies just ahead. The infrastructure we are engineering today is stepping out of the television set and into the very fabric of human capability. As we look to the future, this same network will deliver mind-boggling new features directly into the consumer's hands: fully immersive holographic interactions that collapse the distance between long-distance families, lightning-fast smart-city safety grids that communicate with our cars to eliminate traffic accidents, and real-time AI-driven services that predict and manage our home energy usage and health needs before we even have to ask. We didn't just change how the world watches; we fundamentally changed how humanity connects, works, and lives."
Reliable Electric, the original company that I joined, was purchased and become Reltec, fortunately, my pension plan traveled with the company. Unfortunately, my manager and his Vice President changed, and they wanted “their people” doing various management jobs. I didn’t fit their vision for the future, nor did our sales force. They let us go and hired independent sales representatives. Not getting that tenth year in my pension ended up costing me a lot of money when I finally retired. Our customers were not happy with the new vision, so they lost a lot of business.