Quote:
Originally Posted by Bill Cahill
My love of old TV's started when I was 7 years old. One of the times my mother had the RCA Victor man out for repairs on warranty I sneaked around the back of the set. It was a thrill to see all those orange light bulbs in action. It was just too neat. Today, even seeing the face of the picture tube light up for the first time in many years. The thrill is still there.
Bill Cahill
|
My dad was an electrical engineer, so I grew up around the technology of the 1960s-'70s including, you guessed it, old TVs. At one time I had half our basement full of old TVs, from every major TV manufacturer of the time except Magnavox. My pride and joy was a 1963 VHF-only Zenith 23" b&w console I rescued in 1969 from a trash pile, with a little help from an old friend (that set was in a heavy walnut cabinet and weighed the proverbial ton, so I couldn't possibly have lugged it down to the basement myself). The set was missing every tube except the CRT and HV rectifier, but when I turned the set on for the first time after installing the last new tube and got a picture from a local Cleveland TV station (I grew up in a Cleveland suburb some 30 miles from the stations' towers), I was thrilled. That great picture (my console Zenith TV had 3 video IF stages) was also what got me interested in Zenith TVs, radios and such.
I was very disappointed when I read decades later of Zenith's demise, but that's material for another thread. I still have a small collection of Zenith radios from the early '50s to 1981, all but two working quite well.