How old were you when you first watched television?

I must have been eight or so.  I would go to my friend's house to watch her family's before we got one of our own.  The program I remember most vividly was Inner Sanctum.  It began each week with the sound of a creaking door, the picture of a large metal door, and a scary man's voice saying,"Welcome to the Inner Sanctum".  The program would always be frightening and by the end my friend and I would be laying on the floor very close together.  Then I would have to walk home in the dark.  Always running past the open door of the empty barn that lay in wait between her house and mine.  Always expecting something to come oozing out of the blackness that lay behind that door and grab me.  No, it wasn't the Borgena monster because he was created years later. 
For some reason, we liked to watch scary shows or shows that purported to be scary but were unintentionally funny.  The most vivid in my memory was the movie about giant grasshoppers that were on the march to Chicago.  I don't remember their purpose.  Maybe, to get Mayor Daley.  Our home lay right in the supposed path of these giant insects and we would mark their progress up I57 and scream when they were going past our house.  Yes, it sounds very silly and it was but this was a different time. 
Then there were the fights over who controlled the channel we would watch.  Dad always won and Mom would come in second.  When they weren't in the room, it was up for grabs and to the victor,literally, came their favorite program.  I had to physically subdue my brother when he came in to change the channel from what I was watching.  He never did that again.
That was television as long as it was working.  When it quit, Dad would call the repairman and he would come with his bag of tools and tubes.  We would all be praying it wasn't the picture tube.  That was very expensive and Dad might not be able to afford it.  The television was a very large cabinet with maybe a twelve inch screen.  It was black and white and for a short time it had a plastic overlay that was green and the bottom and blue on top.  It was supposed to make it look like colored tv(that wasn't available at the time) but it didn't.  It just made it look green on the bottom and blue on the top.  TV programming didn't go all day and night.  The stations would sign off at midnight with the playing of The Stars Spangled Banner.  Then the transmission would be the channel's symbol and a sort of humming noise. 
Yes, it did change our lives maybe not in a good way.