[Giants]

Hey Giants, Crusader Rabbit really was for adults. So was Fireman Frank (George Lamont) who was my favorite. Had a puppet chicken called Road Island Red.

We got one Seals game a week (Saturday with two cameras and Don Klein at the mic) until the first UHF station came on air. Think we got a couple of weekly bight games, one at Seals and one from Oakland until the Oaks moved after the '55 season to Vancouver. Klein did Stanford football, Bud Foster did the Oaks radio, Roy Storey the Channel 32 (UHF with a special rabbit ears coil antenna) games and Bob Fouts doing the Niners from Kezar. There was one game of the week on NBC with Lindsey Nelson calling and Red Grange doing color. There were a couple of other games on Dumont but not everybody saw them. CBS handled the NFL GOTW. Rozelle negotiated the contract that guaranteed that every home market in the NFL viewed their home team on CBS on the road. Local games were blacked out. NBC did a deal with the AFL.

Big Game was THE sports event in the Bay Area. The Saturday morning papers had many pages devoted to the game.

Kids actually played outside. We made up our own games, played football in the streets and went to Saturday matinees mostly to raise hell early and then to meet girls a bit later in adolescence. We didn't have the experience of growing up in the country shooting squirrels and swimming in ponds but we did know how to string cherry bombs together and how to lead a moving car with a dirt clod.

Yeah, I remember Fireman Frank as well.  I think that is why I liked those tv shows - they didn’t talk down to kids.

[Giants]

Hey Giants, Crusader Rabbit really was for adults. So was Fireman Frank (George Lamont) who was my favorite. Had a puppet chicken called Road Island Red.

We got one Seals game a week (Saturday with two cameras and Don Klein at the mic) until the first UHF station came on air. Think we got a couple of weekly bight games, one at Seals and one from Oakland until the Oaks moved after the '55 season to Vancouver. Klein did Stanford football, Bud Foster did the Oaks radio, Roy Storey the Channel 32 (UHF with a special rabbit ears coil antenna) games and Bob Fouts doing the Niners from Kezar. There was one game of the week on NBC with Lindsey Nelson calling and Red Grange doing color. There were a couple of other games on Dumont but not everybody saw them. CBS handled the NFL GOTW. Rozelle negotiated the contract that guaranteed that every home market in the NFL viewed their home team on CBS on the road. Local games were blacked out. NBC did a deal with the AFL.

Big Game was THE sports event in the Bay Area. The Saturday morning papers had many pages devoted to the game.

Kids actually played outside. We made up our own games, played football in the streets and went to Saturday matinees mostly to raise hell early and then to meet girls a bit later in adolescence. We didn't have the experience of growing up in the country shooting squirrels and swimming in ponds but we did know how to string cherry bombs together and how to lead a moving car with a dirt clod.

Yeah, I remember Fireman Frank as well.  I think that is why I liked those tv shows - they didn’t talk down to kids.