[Jeffhs]

My family never had color TV (we always had b&w sets, starting with a used 1954 RCA Victor 21" console). The first color set in our house (a Sears Silvertone 25" console) was my grandmother's, when she moved into our place in 1972 after her apartment was sold, and my dad and I moved to the Cleveland suburb of Cleveland Heights (long story and OT).

The first color TV I ever owned outright was a 21" round-screen Silvertone table model from, IIRC, the mid-1960s, a trash find in the neighborhood I grew up in, a Cleveland suburb. That TV lasted almost exactly one year, then the video output circuit board cracked (taking the video output tube with it, making a sickening crunch as the socket fell to the bottom of the cabinet) when I was trying to replace the video output tube, a 6AW8. That crack in the circuit board all but made me sick, as I knew there was no way I could have repaired it at the time.

I didn't have another color TV of my own until some three years later, when I found another Silvertone color set on a trash pile in my old neighborhood, with a 17" CRT. This TV worked even better (and was somewhat smaller (!)) than the table model I just described, and was some years newer than that one as well, since it had UHF.

I enjoyed watching that set for several years, then I bought my first color portable, a Zenith L-1310-C from the late 1970s. Eventually, I decided I wanted a new one, so I bought another Zenith color portable about 10 years later. That set lasted me many years as well, then I moved and eventually replaced that set with an RCA 19" table model. I bought my first flat screen TV in the late '90s, shortly after moving here; it was a 19-inch set, but I wound up replacing it with a 32" HDTV, the set I have today. (I still have the smaller 19" flat screen; it is presently in my bedroom.)

I had then and still have to this day a liking for Zenith entertainment gear, even though the only way anyone can get a Zenith anything these days is on the used market (Zenith went out of business soime time in the eighties, and moved its main plant from Chicago to Korea). Zenith made only one flat screen TV after that, although I have a sneaking suspicion it was not actually made by Zenith but was a Korean-made set with the Zenith name and trademark (the lightning bolt Z) on the cabinet, below the display panel.