A TV from the 50's most likely will not work well as it did new, and likely will soon fail taking out an expensive hard to find part. It will need the electronic equivalent of an overhaul. Mostly to replace wax paper capacitors. Vacuum tubes are more reliable than what you'd remember from back then. Tubes not used (either in the shipping box or in an unused TV set) last indefinately. NOT true of the wax paper caps, those absorb moisture from the air over time (and their time is up) and go electronically leaky, causing the TV circuits to not work right. See my repair page
http://www.geocities.com/wa2ise/radios/repair.htm and
http://www.antiqueradio.org/recap.htm though I would not try to remove all of the old cap lead from terminals (these are fairly fragile). Just clip with small wire cutters.