First Color Show You Ever Saw

[NowhereMan 1966]

Originally Posted by TVBeeGee

Pittsburgh, PA, television market, circa early 1960's. I knew of no one who had color in their home.

The Pittsburgh stations were slow to move to local color, so color sets on demo in stores often displayed black and white...horribly, I might add. Most had gross purity, convergence and/or grayscale tracking, which taught me that it was always obvious when one was looking at a color set.

One of my school friends, Steve, was the son of our local TV repairman, Ralph. We lived in a very small village and Steve's dad did virtually all the TV installation and repair work.

One Friday, I was invited to a sleepover at Steve's house. I had not been there before. The following morning, Steve, his siblings and I, were treated to breakfast and then we moved to their family room to watch Saturday morning cartoons. A black & white cartoon was on at the time. Their set made perfect looking black & white, so of course I thought we were just watching a B&W set, which was quite common in those days.

Suddenly, the screen exploded in magnificent color with the NBC Peacock...and I just about did a backflip off the couch!

It totally blew me away!!!

"You have a COLOR TV!!!", I shrieked. Steve shrugged his shoulders and simply said, "Sure. Doesn't everyone?" "No!", I yelled.

For the next 30 minutes, I watched King Leonardo in total rapture.

Thanks to the expertise of Steve's dad, their TV displayed GORGEOUS color that I had only seen in movie theaters prior to that day.

I was absolutely stunned, went home raving about what I had seen, whereupon my parents promptly told me that color was way too expensive for us. My father also explained that he was waiting until color was "perfected."

Most of the shows my parents watched were on CBS and still ran only in B&W, so that gave them the impression that color was still experimental. I tried to explain that I had certainly SEEN "perfected" color, just like in the movies, but my father stood firm.

Something must have stuck, however. A few years later, in early 1966, my parents ordered their first color set (a Zenith 25NC38). Eventually, it was delivered, installed and tweaked, albeit not by Steve's father. One day when I came home from school, my mom steered me to our family room for the big surprise. I was thrilled. Finally, we had our very own color TV, a 25-inch model!

I begged Mom to let me turn it on. She said I could, but only for a little while, because we would still want to surprise Dad when he came home from work. I pulled the power/volume knob to its on position and after about 15 seconds of warm up, a beautiful picture began to appear…in gorgeous color. It was a Warner Bros. cartoon running on Paul Shannon’s Adventure Time on WTAE-TV.

I will never forget those two days of childhood wonderment and delight! It was an era when seeing color on a TV screen was truly something magical.

I remember Paul Shannon too. I liked hid pun "NOSMO KING." My Aunt Cis had a color TV from circa 1962 or so so I always remember her as "the aunt with the color TV." WE did not get a color set until 1971. BTW, Pittsburgh had a second PBD station, WQEX on channel 16 that broadcasted in black and white up until their old transmitter from WENS-TV burned out For the most part, I remember WQEX was a combination black and white "Britbox" and showed more out of the mainstream programming. They cave back with a color transmitter a year later IIRC,