In 1960 my parents built a house in a high-end neighborhood known as "North Hills" outside of Philadelphia. Two doors down was a neighbor who was an engineer for Philco. He had a 15" color set. I remember the room was very dark and the picture was small and red. Saw my first GE portacolor in that neighborhood, also...

Being born in 1969, I first remember seeing Hogan's Hero's on a new GE 19 inch set that my parents had just got around 1971 or 72. The tv didn't last long and we didn't have another color set until about 1980 which was a used RCA CTC38 console.

Seattle, Washington, In 1961 we lived about one mile from the three
TV transmitters of which when walking home from school I would always stop
at KOMO transmitter (channel 4). I would always be impressed watching a cooking
show on an RCA TM10 15" color monitor.

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.

1966 - My grandparents in Florida had a Zenith 25NC38 in Italian provincial with the "banana knobs" with orange numbers. They would let my brother and I watch cartoons and maybe a few other shows we watched then, especially Hogan's Heroes and Get Smart. Miami had 2-4-7-10 and Palm beach 5-12, and WCIX-6 in Coconut Grove had awesome cartoons but too snowy to wtach. Other relatives in FLA had a 66 Magnavox 25" color, it was usually on a football game. After this annual visit, we would go back to our '63 Motorola 19" BW in San Antonio, where I don't recall any neighbors having color. The peacock taunted us and our faithful Motorola with "in living color" strutting about for years afterward.

My parents did not get color until late 71, long after most of our other relatives, a full 3 years after moving to PA. My Grandma 2 miles down the road had a 21" RCA ctc5 "special" and never turned it on when we visited. A few times I turned it on when she wasn't looking and that wasn't too often :nono: I got swatted every time " now mind!" she corrected in her thick Dutchified accent.

My folks heard enough bad things about that CTC5, yet Grandma had a service contract and excellent reception on PHL's 4 VHF's. It seemed every time she changed between these few channels, the color "was all wrong" and she would adjust it. That usually failed so she would unplug it, waiting for RCA service to show up. I was never there when they did and she "traded" it in on a 71 25V chromacolor after the RCA "made a smell like burnt plastic". I just wanted it in our basement, totally sure I could fix it at 6 years old:D

All this time, my Aunt and Uncle had a 21" Zenith 24NC31 "Alton" they bought at a department store with wedding money - only $400!!! My Aunt would have it on all day five years running by then, not even turning it off for thunderstorms! My Aunt and Uncle also got PHL's 3 UHF channels, there was something for everybody on that TV. Cartoons were always in color :D. Dad though it was finally safe to go color, especially after seeing Grandmas 71 CC and seeing the Florida grandparents set looking good every time we visited.

I knew this new 71 CC (besides our favorite shows) was 1972's summer Olympics and how blue the water was that Mark Spitz swam in. It was literally occult-looking unreal, bright and clear. I got in trouble with some of my friends parents, mostly RCA and GE owners, when I tried to make their set look as good as ours.

For me, it's kind of the opposite.
The first B&W show ever seen, as a child, almost everything was already color, and as I mentioned before, my parents had the old RCA ctc-10a Sullivan from my grandparents.
And as a kid, I was very much into scifi and related stuff, and thus was always glued to the TV every day for the afternoon running of the syndicated show Lost In Space, which was showing late season 2.
And as weeks went by, the went into season 3 and to the end of that and back to season 1.

And that is where I started to freak out a bit, played with the TV controls a bit, did not help...


“Mommy! There is something wrong with the TV, there is no color!!”

Yep. I'm more than 30 years too young to have seen some of the first color TVs. I couldn't tell you the first show I saw in color because they all were. I do remember seeing my first B&W show, The Three Stooges. Still have the VHS tape.

The oldest color TV I've seen IRL is my CTC-21 console, which I need to put the fly back in it and see if the silly-cone job holds this time........

Imagine being a person from the 1700's, brought forward in time to today. Then, as that same 1700's person, imagine if someone stood you near a modern runway and you got to see a Boeing 747 leap into the air. Something the size of a small office building, with hundreds of people aboard, climbing so fast into the sky! Shocking. Magic! That's what it felt like to see color suddenly appear on a television screen in the B&W days. Truly magical.

Just in time for Christmas 1965, my Grandfather bought a new Zenith color console, with a 24MC32 chassis; it was one of those sets with the little diagonal spindly legs. He invited my Dad to bring the kids down to watch the Rudolph cartoon special. My Grandfather often got the color, tint, and fine tuning out of adjustment, and my Dad had to pay a visit to straighten things out. I have a near twin to that set in my collection.

I love this story!

It is fun to see things from "the other side" compared to what I am used to.

I must add that the color on Rudolph was a bit subdued, compared to the commercials and other shows. A year or so later, I can remember seeing a Star Trek episode on that set which was more colorful. The NBC chime ID was impressive, with the screen flashing a vivid red, blue, and green with each note. Of course, there also was the Peacock!

Bonanza and Mutual of Omahas Wild Kingdom at my grandmothers house. We had a B & W set, so when there was a color show on we sometimes went to her house to watch it. She had a GE console about the size of a small truck!

We were probably the last family on the block to have a color TV, but I remember visiting my Dads cousin that had a RCA color TV in the mid 60s and watching the Wonderful World of Color Sunday nights on NBC. Also spent a fair amount of time with my friend next door whose family had a Packard Bell color set.

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.

That set was undoubtedly made by LG (Goldstar), which had taken over Zenith by then.

I was a Sears technician back in the 1970s, and worked on quite a few of their tube color sets. They used that RCA CTC15/16/17 clone chassis for several years, even with a rectangular CRT. RCA didn't make them; they came from Warwick.