[drh4683]

This sale was at 8220 W 89th Ave in Hickory Hills, IL. This is an early 1964 RCA Victor CTC-15 round screen. This was a really nice original house built in 1962. The TV was in the basement which fortunately was very dry and clean, so the TV has no problems at all. Its in excellent original condition still and was very well cared for. Its a model 14-G724-MV and I think someone in the other thread mentioned the name is "The Randolph" and it has the CTC-15AA chassis to be exact. I've never seen this particular control layout before, so I was unaware of that triangular looking logo above the control panel was the color hologram. I always liked those. They wanted $50.00 for it in as-is condition of course which I paid after waiting nearly a half hour in line as everyone in front of me had a many things. One of the guys at the sale helped me move it up and out to my truck which is always a great help. Looking around in the work shop, I found some tube boxes that contained some original tubes that got pulled out of this set, so I took those along as there is a slight chance they are still good yet and I'll put those back in the set if they are. The people who lived here were WWII generation, the mans name was Orlow Vedder, and he was an electrical engineer at Western Electric. One of the bedrooms upstairs was his office, where he had some promotional things from Western Electric's "Engineers Week" and also numerous drafting items, books etc. which I also bought. He also had some interesting "bombing angle calculators" that must have been his when he was in the air force as it all said "property of US Air force" and appeared to be WWII era. I bought that stuff up too and it was cheap. The WWII uniforms and clothing is always very expensive and fortunately, many collect that type of thing so it always gets saved. He had most of his WWII stuff down in the basement. I always enjoyed these "greatest generation" estate sales best, they were the true Americans and they always seemed to live a great middle class life because of how well their homes were taken care of and the nice things they had.
When I got the set home, first things first and thats take the back off and see whats in there. I was glad to see the dry grey fluff dust which is a sign it was always in a clean home. The infamous brightener was on the CRT which was the bad news... However, with a very slight rejuv, that tube came back very strong and tracked well, so I don't think that brightener was on very long from an operational standpoint. Its still the original CRT, just a little bit of cataracts. The TV appeared to be low hours though, the boards are in great shape still and not overheated, mostly all original tubes are still in it too. All the chassis screws were still underneath, and it doesn't appear that the chassis ever got pulled for repair. Only thing out of place was the tuner shield sitting on the bottom of the cabinet. I noticed the on off volume switch didn't "click" when it was pulled out. When I went to power up the set with the cheater cord and a huge burst of sparks and flames shot out from the volume switch and then it started smoking nearly starting the wires on fire. It was pretty intense, must have been some carbon arcing going on there. That switch is toast, who knows, that might be one of the main reasons that originally put the TV out of commission. I jumped it and the TV powered up fine, good brightness and great sound, lytics were nice and cool to the touch. No color sync which Im sure is the usual 6GH8's. The TV looks like it should work fine but I'll leave that and the power switch replacement up to Dwight as he is the one who wanted me to save this one for him.