Cable TV may give us 50 channels, DirecTV provides hundreds of channels and there are literally dozens of streaming apps with more appearing every day.

When I was a child, we got two channels, WRC-TV (Channel 4) and WTTG (Channel 5), both out of Washington.

D.C. had two other stations, channels 7 and 9, but you had to have a bigger antenna to receive their signals. We were poor and had an antenna that had been salvaged from the dump. We got just two channels.

Television and my generation grew up together. The medium was invented in the 1930s, but it didn’t start appearing in middle-class households until the early-to-mid 1950s. A few bars had TVs in the late 1940s, mainly to attract customers who wanted to watch sporting events that were occasionally televised.

It was, however, around 1956 before TV made it into a few living rooms in my rural neighborhood. My family got our first TV about 1960, a used cabinet model someone had repaired but never picked up. We got it from the repair shop for $20.

We watch TV today on our cell phones and think that is really cool. The first TV I ever watched (at a great-uncle’s home) had a screen about 10 inches across and we thought that was really cool.

Oh, the TV itself was about 3 feet wide, 2 feet tall and 2 feet deep. It contained all manner of vacuum tubes, condensers and resistors plus a picture tube. But the screen itself was about 10 inches wide and 8 inches high.

Today we hit the remote button and the TV comes on within a second. It took the tubes in those early TVs one or two minutes to “warm up.” and produce a picture.

It was an all black-and-white world back then, with plenty of snow (static interference). The amount of snow depended upon how far you lived from the station’s antenna or how elaborate your antenna was. At my house, we often thought we were watching Perry Como singing in a blizzard.

Oh, yeah. You turned out all the lights to watch TV in those early days, I suppose because that’s what they did in the movie theaters. The rule was that the TV provided the only light, which caused doctors to declare that television would ruin kids’ eyes.

As I said, I salvaged our first antenna from a trash heap somewhere and then cut a 10-foot-high sapling on which to mount it. Wood is an insulator so it was not conducive to providing the best quality picture. And being only 10 feet high doesn’t provide much altitude. It was not perfect, but when you’re poor, you learn to make do.

Channel 4 (NBC, as it is today) was OK. It allowed us to watch Dinah Shore, “Bonanza” and Perry Como. Channel 5 was better because it had “Popeye” cartoons and the “Three Stooges.”

And WTTG (no Fox affiliation at the time — an independent station) had “rassling” twice a week. Many of my old country neighbors lived for wrestling on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

At some point I had a brilliant idea that, looking back, amazes me that I am now alive. To get better reception — and my brothers and I desperately wanted to get Channel 7 with all those Warner Bros. westerns — I decided to create my own antenna by hanging a metal clothes hanger (with the antenna wire attached) on the electric wires (they were insulated in worn cloth) attached to the house.

A 12-year-old boy standing on a metal porch roof holding a metal clothes hanger that he is hanging on frayed cloth concealing at least 120 volts of electricity. Does that sound like a recipe for disaster?

Then, the clothes hanger had to be moved about, adjusted to find the right spot for the best picture. My brother would yell up when the picture was good. Then a puff of wind and we’d have to adjust once more.

Today we flip channels like nobody’s business. On that first TV, the on-off knob broke so I had to use needle-nose pliers to pull the metal rod out (on) and push it in (off).

Then the plastic channel knob wore out so I needed regular pliers to change the channel. A tool set became part of TV watching.

No, I don’t take TV for granted today. I remember the two-channel days when you had to go out in the rain and snow to adjust the antenna.

But as I said, when you grow up poor, you learn to make do.