I remember the old TV days pretty much the same as you do, but I don't remember watching Garfield Goose. I do remember Howdy Doody and Kukla,Fran, and Ollie as being two of my favorites.
Speaking of snow, we used to get that on the TV all the time in those days. I had forgotten that, and I'm sure that most people half our age wouldn't even know what I was talking about. Then there was the vertical hold and the horizontal hold, which you could adjust with knobs. You usually had to adjust them when you first turned on the TV, and then again when you changed channels. Every time an airplane headed in or out of Midway passed over our house, the vertical and horizontal holds would go nuts, but there was no point in adjusting them until the plane was gone. Then they would sometimes settle down by themselves, but not always. Sometimes, when the adjusting knobs proved ineffective, you could stamp your foot on the floor or whack the side of the TV with the palm of your hand, but that didn't always work either. I don't remember if there was anything you could do about the snow. Some days it was worse than others, which we attributed to weather conditions. Looking back on it, though, it was more likely caused by electronic interference of some sort.
Chicago is known for its cold and snowy winters, but it's nothing compared to Northern Michigan. Of course, it's not the same every year. People like to say that the winters were worse when they were kids, and there's probably some truth to that, but it wasn't all the winters. I remember two or three hard winters in the 1950s, but I also remember at least one mild one. My grandparents went to Florida for a week or so after Christmas, and we had warmer weather in Chicago than they had in Florida. Of course, that wasn't normal, which is probably why I remember it. We tend to remember the extremes and forget the average stuff, it's just human nature.
Cheboygan is about 50 miles north of the Lake Michigan Snow Belt, and they generally get a lot more snow than we do, but whatever snow we do get is likely to still be on the ground after theirs is all gone. We are not much colder than they are, so I've always wondered about that. These last two snow events that we got came off of Lake Huron to the east, which is unusual but not unheard of. I told you how light and fluffy that snow was and, now that I think of it, lake effect snow is often like that. This may explain why Traverse City can get two feet while we get two inches and, two weeks later, theirs is all gone while ours is still here. That fluffy stuff doesn't have to melt, it just evaporates directly from snow to water vapor in the air. Well, technically, that process is called "sublimation", not "evaporation", but most people don't know that.
Snow sublimates more readily when the air is cold and dry, and we've been getting a lot of that lately. It was 12 below at our place on Monday morning, which was the coldest we've had this season. Sub zero temperatures are not uncommon for us in January or February, but mid December is a little early for that to happen. I don't mind winter weather but, as far as I'm concerned, it doesn't need to ever get below zero. I mean, isn't that why they call it "zero"?
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