In 1975 when I took this shot, some television shows were being broadcast in color, but most people in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood were still receiving them on black and white TV sets. These black and white TVs were very small by today’s standards. They usually had 12 to 20 inch screens. I couldn’t afford a color TV myself until 1976. A color TV set cost the equivalent of an entire month of my salary after taxes. The black and white sets of the day had cathode ray and vacuum tubes. Flat screen TVs wouldn’t become commonplace for another 25 years. It wasn’t until 2007 that LCD sales surpassed CRT sales for the first time. I remember when I started working at Leo Burnett in 1972 that networks charged advertisers a premium for color commercials. Many commercials were still being filmed in black and white. Videotape had not yet replaced film.
