Wanted to update this thread. The CRT is still working fine after all this time still.
But in the meantime, I kept observing the TV's little quirks, and the audio kept getting weaker and weaker with less bass to the point you had to put it on max with distortion to even hear anything.
So I went all out and recapped the whole TV. Used United Chemicon KMG series electrolytic caps. I found about 6 bad capacitors, two that were completely open, one of which was in the audio circuit. A majority of the smaller value caps were quite marginal on my ESR meter. Only the larger value caps were still good (but I changed them out anyway.)
And now, holy crap does that TV perform now, especially in the audio department. The picture really improved too. So I am quite pleased with the results.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJYpTz00bFU
This TV should be good to go for a long time now.
And this is one of many future recap projects coming up. As I've mentioned I have about 40+ TVs from 1952 - 1982 that needs restored.