Just past the front door of a grand old Palo Alto home is a living room paneled in wood to match the wood veneer on an RCA Victor television cabinet. There is a TV dinner waiting on a gold-leaf TV tray atop the TV table. "The Andy Griffith Show" is on.
The entire scene could be a museum piece from 1960, which is exactly what it is. The inviting display at the door is the point of entry to "Television: A History" at the Museum of American Heritage, which may be the loftiest name for the littlest museum in the country.
The house that houses the museum was built in 1907 by Dr. Thomas Williams. His family donated it to the city of Palo Alto in 1989, thereby sacrificing millions in future development profits for a square acre just south of downtown. The Williams family decreed that the home be used for cultural purposes, and that is how the museum ended up here, in 1997. Permanent installations include a 1920s general store in a side parlor, a 1930s kitchen with a wood- and coal-burning stove, a print shop, a working garage with a 1915 Model T, and a garden restored with plantings popular in the 1920s.
Always free and open only on Fridays and weekends, the museum operates with one full-time employee and a posse of volunteer curators, gardeners, docents and collections managers. By their definition, "American Heritage" means a collection of more than 5,000 electrical and mechanical artifacts from the 1950s and before, all stored off-site.
"There is a gigantic warehouse stuffed to the rafters with sewing machines, calculators, typewriters, cameras and devices, mostly home related," says museum president Jim Wall. "I assert that we have the largest collection of electrical and mechanical artifacts outside of the Smithsonian. We have a little bit of everything."
Exhibitions rotate twice a year, and when they need an idea, they go to the warehouse and rummage around. In the pile are probably 50 tube televisions including sets by Philco and Packard Bell, not to be confused with Hewlett-Packard, which started in a garage a few blocks away. To tell the history, 17 were selected, ranging from 1947, when a home set was still a luxury item, through 1959, when there were 50 million TV sets in the United States.
The only conceit to the era of colored TV is a side display of metal lunch boxes decorated with shows like "Laugh-In," "Gentle Ben," "The Munsters" and "The Man From U.N.C.L.E."
Everything else is primitive, including remote controls that only reached so far as the cable connecting to the TV, and a variety of TV lamps, which sat atop the set to ease the eyestrain of the viewer.
There are rabbit-ear antennas and rooftop. None of them helps. The TVs cannot get reception because they are not rigged to cable or satellite dishes. The familiar screech of Barney Fife's voice comes from a suitcase Philco that has had its tubes replaced by a hidden DVD player.
The innards of these old tubes are on display, and standing by to offer an explanation is a resident geek of the type that ran film projectors in schools during the '60s.
One such "audio-video" type is John Eckland, who is 61 and already retired from the electronics industry.
"When I was a kid, I'd get $5 for fixing one of these," he says, standing by a tabletop set. "When I mowed somebody's lawn, I'd get 50 cents."
His next-door neighbor in Palo Alto was Gordy Soltau, the great 49ers receiver. After trying and failing to get the young Eckland interested in throwing the ball around, Soltau gave up and offered the kid a broken 1951 RCA Victor. Eckland hauled it home in his Radio Flyer wagon and fixed it.
"I watched the hell out of TV when I was a kid," says Eckland, whose teachers at Jordan Middle School would bring in their TVs so he could repair them. "I was head over heels in love with these things."
Asked what somebody who was not part of the A-V crew could get from the exhibition, Eckland is momentarily stumped. "Boy," he says. "I don't know. Some will obviously be hit with nostalgia and say (draws a deep breath and exhales), 'There's our TV.' "
"Television: A History": through March 23 at the Museum of American Heritage, 351 Homer Ave., Palo Alto. Open 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Fridays and weekends. Free. (650) 321-1004. www.moah.org.
Sam Whiting is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: swhiting@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @samwhitingsf
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