Emoji in the Olden Days

kids today don't even know that TV stations used to go black/blank after a certain time at night - wasn't 24 hours like it is now

We only got ABC and CBS way out east on Long Island when I was a kid. We didn't even get the NY stations--we got the Connecticut affiliates instead, for some reason. My friends in the next town over got those two plus NBC so if I wanted to see that new TV show "Saturday Night Live" I had to go to a friend's house for a sleepover (it was on so late!). Took a long time before my mom's house got cable.

In the Philadelphia suburbs, we were blessed with three UHF channels, even back in the '60s. They didn't come in all that clearly, though, depending on the weather and your patience in adjusting the antenna. Philadelphia's PBS station was actually based in Wilmington, DE, though I think they had a broadcast antenna on the Roxborough heights a bit northwest of Philly, like most of our stations did.
Local listings included another PBS station in Allentown, that some of the outlying suburbs might have been able to get reliably. I don't believe I ever tried, since their programming didn't vary all that much from the other one. In the later '70s I believe a couple more UHF stations popped up, and as cable was just getting established in the early '80s, as Philadelphia proper dragged its feet in granting cable franchises, there were even one or two broadcast "scrambler" stations on UHF channels, were you could rent a decoder box to pick up their movie offerings. Those died out quickly once cable was widely available.

I remember the feel and the sound of turning the dial ... and turning, and turning to get to the channel I wanted.

i was a kid in the 80s so i don't go back as far as cable-less tv. We had cable and satellites in the area, even in the early 80s. But I do remember having friends who had really old tvs with the two screws for hooking up an antenna.