Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve D.
Good going Eric,
Looks like a nice clean example w/a good crt. And ez to transport.
-Steve D.
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I just had to tell this story if I haven't before about transporting one of these. As a latch key kid I was put on an airplane every summer to spend time with my mom. One summer around 1981 I found one of these while yard sale hunting with my mom down in Alabama. I think I gave $5 for the almost mint working set. Almost meaning that it had a tendency to get vertical roll.
In those days 50s sets were quite common and sort of considered junk for the most part. But this space age rocketship design to me was 'over the top' and I loved it. So I could not allow myself to be separated from it upon going back to old Virginnie. So on the day of my flight home I carried that RCA right on that plane! There was even enough room in the area above the seat to hold it! I sure did, and I remember someone helping me get the thing up on the cargo shelf and oddly I don't remember getting any hairy eyeball looks. Of course in those days I think people still didn't look at television as some sort of birthright; actually it was still more of a small investment worth repairing. Certainly not a throw away item; not yet. And for sure we didn't carry them around in our pockets like everyone is doing these days.
Anyway, in today's paranoid air terrorism scene I just bet this scenario would raise every red flag in the book in an airport. Heck, the security people probably wouldn't know that it's a TV first off. Just the built in rabbit ears would certainly be the makings of a bomb and rightly so. You could probably make a deadly weapon out of an old set in a hundred ways. Seems I didn't keep the set very long and it developed bad sync issues and at that young age I was pretty much limited to drug store trips to test tubes. It wasn't a tube so I think I took the set apart for practice. A lot of now great sets were donated to me self educating in a doomed career path.....
10-19-2014, 12:32 AM
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