I learned a lot from my grandparents about soap operas.
Whenever my father's parents came to visit us, an intermission to the visit occurred between the hours of 12:30 to 4:00 pm weekdays. They had to watch "their shows." Luckily "their shows" were on ABC because that's the only network that came in clearly at my house when I was a kid.
I was raised in a rural area, "the hollow," with a TV antenna on the roof. There was a controller that would allow us to rotate it. This was located in the hallway, so improving the signal was a team effort. One of us would stand in the living room calling out such things as "Better, better, worse, worse, terrible, better, not bad" while the other would blindly rotate the wheel that controlled the antennae in smallish increments and say things like "Is it better yet?" and "It won't turn any further." The response was often "Go back about halfway" or "Go back to where it was in the beginning." And the wheel would be turned in larger increments and howl and groan in protest. And in the end, we often had to resign ourselves to the overwhelming choice of ABC or ABC.
There were days we could get CBS - usually in the winter when there were no leaves on the trees. And sometimes we could get FOX or NBC - when the wind was blowing the leaves in the right direction. But we could always count on ABC - which strangely came to us from an entirely different state. Perhaps it was the Catskill Mountains blocking the signals of all the New York stations (including PBS and therefore Sesame Street) while a gully ran straight to the ABC station in New Haven, Connecticut. I should consult a topographical map some day and check, because I always found this phenomenon curious.
In later years, my dad installed a satellite dish on the roof next to the antenna. Unfortunately the satellite dish was not motorized, so tuning a station in was still a team effort. One brave soul would climb onto the roof and push the dish until it met up with the pencil line markings my father had drawn on the roof. Another person would watch the television from inside the house. And sometimes there was a third person to relay messages, standing on the front steps with the door to the living room wide open, hollering such things as "Clearer, almost, go back, a little more, wait, back again" and "Is it better yet?" to the roof and living room respectively.
In the wintertime we were less interested in getting clear reception, because that meant leaving the front door open to chilly air and climbing on a cold, slippery roof covered with ice or snow. Although this trek had to be made semi-regularly to empty the bowl-shaped dish of the snow it had collected, we were usually resigned to whatever came in clearly without sliding around on the roof - much like in the early days when our only reliable station was ABC, the station that played the soaps that my grandparents religiously watched.
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