The closest thing that one would remotely consider "portable" would be classified as a "table model". The first in the RCA line was the CTC-4: check out Ed Reitan's gallery of color receivers at
http://www.novia.net/~ereitan/Gallery/CTC4_Gallery.html
Concur with the degaussing. According to RCA's field service literature, the CTC-16 (a roundie) was the first chassis to have auto degaussing as standard on MOST models. But probably not the table models as they were made to sell cheaply.