This Ohio museum shows that TV is older than you might think

By STEVE WARTENBERG
Associated Press

The history of television began long before millions of people gathered in front of their black-and-white sets and fiddled with the antenna and horizontal hold to watch Lucy and Howdy Doodie. That’s clear from a visit to the Early Television Museum outside Columbus, Ohio. It has sets going back a century, to the 1920s. It also has scores of the much-improved, post-World War II, black-and-white sets that changed entertainment. There are several first-generation color sets from the early 1950s. Collector Steve McAvoy, now 80 years old, started the museum. He rescued many old sets from people’s basements and attics. The museum has one of the world’s largest collections on TV history.