WILLOW CREEK — The television age has come to Willow Creek.
Seamus O’Donnell, proprietor of the Willow Creek General Store, this week installed a brand-new 12-inch Dumont television set on the store’s mezzanine, where it has already drawn crowds of curious residents eager to see moving pictures received through the air.
“The picture’s not as clear as the movies in Houlton,” O’Donnell acknowledged, adjusting the set’s rabbit-ear antenna, “but you don’t have to drive twenty miles to see it.”
The set, purchased from a Bangor appliance dealer for $249.95, receives signals from two stations — WABI-TV in Bangor and WAGM-TV in Presque Isle. Programming is limited to evening hours, but that has not stopped the crowds. Last Saturday night, twenty-three people crowded into the store to watch a boxing match from Madison Square Garden.
“It was something to see,” said Ezra Homan, who watched the fight from a perch on a sack of chicken feed. “You could see every punch. Of course, you could hear the radio call just as well, but seeing it — that was different.”
Homan’s son Amos, age six, was among the children who pressed closest to the screen. “I could see the boxer’s face when he got hit,” Amos reported.
The mill has adjusted its schedule to accommodate the new attraction. Night shift workers are being offered the option of switching to the day shift on Saturdays so they can join their families at the General Store.
The Gazette notes that while television is a marvel of modern science, it is unlikely to replace the printed word as the primary source of news for Willow Creek residents. “The Gazette will not be adapting its format for the new medium just yet,” Editor Arthur Whitcomb wrote. “A newspaper can be read by the woodstove. A television requires electricity, and we all remember what happens when the power goes out.”