During the five seasons of The Wire, portly Eastside drug kingpin Joseph “Proposition Joe” Stewart operated from John’s Radio & Television, where he brought new life to electric clocks and various small appliances while navigating the dicey territory between rival gangs.

The shop, located at 301-303 S. Highland in Highlandtown, actually was a radio and television repair business for many years.

A recent visit to our popular Google Streetview Tour of The Wire filming locations elicited a response that piqued my interest.

“My father was John Moscato of John’s Radio & TV in Highlandtown. If they ever take down the blue awning, you will still see the original TV shop sign,” wrote Mary Moscato Chaikin, retired chief of the Psychology Library at Princeton University.

“My father had the very first television in the city of Baltimore in 1947,” Chaikin added. “Buses would stop and people would get off the see the ‘new invention.’”

I wanted to know more.

John Moscato, the oldest of John and Mary Moscato’s three children (Tom is in the middle and Mary was the baby of the family) was kind enough to fill in some details.

John, the son, retired from the Baltimore City Department of Public Works in 1996. Tom retired this year from a career selling cafeteria services to large organizations and lives in Baltimore County.

The images are from the Moscato family, and the stories part of the family lore.

The elder John Moscato grew up during the emergence of radio, fascinated by the technology. Radio opened horizons for many Americans, delivering free music, entertainment, and informative programming directly into the living room.

Moscato worked for 18 years at the Sparrow’s Point shipyard. In the early 1940s, he took a correspondence course on radio repair. Shortly thereafter he began repairing radios for fellow shipyard workers and family friends, gaining experience and confidence along the way.

His radio repair sideline became so lucrative that he quit the shipyard and in 1946, opened John’s Radio Sales and Service in rented retail space at 304 S. Highland. The business quickly grew to a substantial operation with the help of his brothers-in-law Ted and Louis Fratta.

Television had been introduced to the American public at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City. The device remained a curiosity for a many years.

With no television stations yet in operation, there was no reason for ordinary people to own a set — even if there were some place to buy one. “At that time, Baltimore had no televisions anywhere for sale or on display,” explains the younger John Moscato.

The potential for the new medium was demonstrated in 1947, when Johns Hopkins transmitted the first surgical procedure over closed-circuit television — the pioneering “blue baby” operation by Alfred Blalock that launched the era of open heart surgery.

That same year Moscato bought a do-it-yourself television kit from Tele-Tone, consisting of a bewildering boxful of vacuum tubes, wires, and schematic drawings.

“I remember as a six-year-old child, my father building the set from the many parts and schematic drawings,” John Moscato recalls. “My grandfather watched him work said, “You mean to tell me that a picture is going to float through the air and come out here on this tube?” My father said, “That’s right pop!” and my grandfather replied, You’re crazy!”

Sadly, John Moscato’s maternal grandfather passed away before the television set was completed and never got to see pictures fly through the air.

The set was finally finished in mid-1947. “That first TV had a channel 1,” John Moscato says. “Nobody seems to believe me on that, but it did.”

With an antenna on the roof and the set for sale in the store window, the television instantly became a sensation even though there was hardly anything to watch. “It seemed the entire neighborhood came to see it,” he recalls.

Baltimore still had no television stations. The only working channel was out of Washington, DC, which broadcast for several hours in the evening. Within a few months the Baltimore Sun launched WMAR-TV.

The first person broadcast in Baltimore was Evening Sun reporter Jim McKay (a native born Jim McManus), who became an ABC sportscaster best known for Wide World of Sports and a legend from his spot reporting of the terrorist attack during the 1968 Olympics in Munich.

Telecasts of boxing championship matches drew huge crowds to the sidewalk in front of John’s Radio Sales and Service. Rocky Graziano defeated Tony Zale to win boxing’s world middleweight championship, and later that year Joe Louis, the “Brown Bomber,” defeated Jersey Joe Walcott to retain his heavyweight championship.

“My father would have the fights on TV in the store window and many people, probably around a hundred, would stand out front of the store and onto Highland Avenue to watch the fight on a 7-inch screen,” John Moscato recalls.

“In those days, horizontal and vertical picture alignments where not very stable and the picture quality was weak,” he says. “My father would be constantly adjusting the knobs, while my uncle would be on the roof adjusting the antenna so the crowds could see a better picture. This drew the attention of the local Baltimore newspapers such as the News American and the Sun, and in 1947, they printed stories about my father’s shop, the ‘first television’ in Baltimore, and the crowds that came to see it.”

“The first TV show I personally remember besides the fights was The Howdy Doody Show,” John says. “What else would a 6-year-old be interested in?”

Soon televisions were available from wholesalers. John’s Radio Sales and Service became John’s Radio and Television, with five to ten sets for sale at the store at any time–none of which had a channel 1.

“That first, hand built Tele-Tone TV was eventually sold and it came back in trade and sold again at least two more times when we lost track of it,” John Moscato says.

In 1952, the business moved into more spacious quarters across the street at 301-303 S. Highland, at the corner of Gough. Four years later Moscato bought the building. The family lived behind the shop.

The senior Moscato passed away in 1974, and the business remained in operation by his widow Mary and her brother, Louis Fratta. Mary ran the business until 1999, when she had to give up due to declining health at age 80. She passed away in 2007.

During production of Homicide: Life on the Street, prop crews often visited John’s Radio and Television to buy old TVs, radios, and VCRs.

The imprint of John’s Radio and Television in popular culture as Prop Joe’s place is a fitting tribute to its role in local history.

Photos: The Moscato family