Yeah she was really cool. She was kind of low key until she asked what I was going to do with it and I told her I was going to try to repair it. Then she opened right up and started talking about the tv repair business 'When I started out, most of the sets we got still had 5u4s in them' was how she began her story. She said she and her husband got out of working on tvs altogether as she said you had to be crooked to make any money out of it, and her employer at the time was, in her mind, dishonest. Primarily he sold pricey service contracts at 59.95 per year, which was indeed high. She also disliked how all service techs had to say 'it looks like it will need to go in for an overhaul' which meant an 80.00 bill, even if there was really nothing wrong with the set. However, if you flipped at the 80.00 price tag 'well, we have these great service contracts that would save you from costly overhauls....' She said her employer was not the only one who did this, and it seemed to her to be more of an industry-wide type thing; and she just got sick of taking sixty bucks from naive old ladies. Wow.
On a lighter note, I have gone through all of the tubes I got from her:
the tube caddy looks like one of these:
http://cgi.ebay.com/Vintage-RCA-tube...d=p3286.c0.m14
So it is pretty typical of the era. It was packed tight with tubes, organized as high voltage and sweep tubes in one compartment, miniatures in the other, and everything else down in the middle. A wide range of tubes from the fifties to the mid sixties. The caddy itself is the first one I have ever seen that did not have a tube brand advertised across it, such as RCA on the ebay example I provided. Instead the top is covered in a generic checkerboard pattern.
The box of older tubes held a lot of big amp tubes, some 2a3s, 807s and 6l6s. I am not familiar with amp tubes but these are pretty cool. The rest are all receiving tubes and they are all pre 1935 in design ie-only a couple of metal radiotrons, etc. She said her husband fixed radios as a hobby for a while so that is where these came from.
I saw some other gear sitting around while I was there-a Heathkit VOM, a degaussing coil, several rusty rack mount tube amps, and other odd bits and pieces. I would have certainly worn out my welcome asking about that stuff. Sorry for the ramble, but I thought I would get down my thoughts about the day before I forgot all about it.