Wow, the way you describe your story combined with the likelyhood that GE could have and would have kept the media hushed through secret illegal methods bring me to think it could be true.
This is very likely to be the best place to find out for sure. Many extremely well-educated and honest people are often here.

I can hardly wait to get to the bottom of this!
I just hope that the one or two guys that may know are not still being paid or threatened to keep thier mouth shut!

You can search and find many GE color sets here. Some are from your time frame with beautiful pictures on them.

Maybe GE had a handful of very oddly defective color sets with some wild engineering blunder or parts from china... I guess back then japan was more likely to supply.

Could japan have been like china today? Causing us trouble by pretending not to know lead is in thier products? Like lead won't cause multitudes of people to aquire cancers or even worse to cause multitudes to not be able to think very well. Gee... I wonder if that is part of the reason people like me can't keep our thoughts straight half the time?
I saw one product from china recently that had a hole in the package telling you to touch it! Like people need to touch a cell phone cover to like it better?