[Charlie]

I used to have the set that Rod shows in the newspaper ad. It was my grandparents' set... the first color TV they bought in '75. Story goes, when they first bought it, it went thru two picture tubes in the first year (each replaced under warranty). After the 3rd tube was installed, my grandfather got tired of Sears telling him they couldn't find anything wrong with the set that would cause the tubes to fail... so my uncle took the set and played with it for a few days. He found what he felt like was a poor solder connection and corrected it. The set was fine after that... never having a CRT issue again.

In 1985, they bought their second color set (which is still in their living room today) and gave me the old Sears set. I used the set for 6 years and then bought a new set. My girlfriend's mom was having a garage sale and we put it in the sale. No one bought the set, and it stayed under the carport that night. The next morning, the set was gone!

The set had a slight design flaw... the tuner did not like humid days. The tuner was touch activated. If the humidity was high, it would always get stuck on channel two. If you touched another channel tab, it would go to that channel, but then go back to 2 when you removed your finger. To deal with this problem, my grandparents would put a penny in the little space between the tab and the frame for the channel they wanted to watch.