In the first months after he was born in 1994, my son wouldn’t sleep at night. He would bawl until you held him and then cry again if you dared try to put him down.

When I was on sit-up-with-the-baby duty, I took for granted that I could occupy myself sitting there by watching TV – in particular, the rebroadcast of that night’s installment of Ken Burns’ “Baseball” series on the local PBS station.

Here’s the thing: My son inherited his inability to rest at night from his father. And unlike me, my Mom had nothing to keep her company.

That’s because TV stations – and there were only seven of them on the VHS band in New York in 1954 – signed off the air at or soon after midnight.

They played a filmed recording of the National Anthem, and then put on patterns of bars and circles called a test pattern with a ringing sound in the background. The patterns were crafted by individual stations – some of them used a template with a Native American in a headdress. 

At 5:30 or 6 a.m., the stations would take off the pattern, play the National Anthem again, mention that they carried the Seal of Good Practice from the National Association of Broadcasters, show some local minister delivering a sermon, and then do some kind of start-of-day programming.

Unfortunately, my Mom is no longer around to tell me what she actually did while trying to get me to sleep the first two years of my life. But as the broadcasting day lengthened over time, she spent quite a bit of time staying up and watching old movies.

The CBS station in New York pushed the limits, at one point only being off the air for about a half-hour a day. By the late 1970s, local TV stations were on all night. 

Now, of course, it’s not just the local stations that are on all night. So is every cable channel – although many of them run infomercials to fill those late hours. And you can stream stuff.

My mother could only dream of that as her son refused to go to Dreamland.