[Jeffhs]

My first vintage set, IIRC, was an early1950s Capehart console. My great-aunt had just gotten a new portable TV, so she gave me the Capehart set. Worked reasonably well the short time I had it. It eventually quit several years later, but I saved the cabinet and converted it to a tool chest (this was decades before the Internet and VK). That TV was one of the very early '50s models with a round CRT (16GP4 I think) and perhaps a continuous tuner. This set also had a small box in series with the power cord (the box sat in the bottom of the cabinet, near the 12" speaker), which years later I found out was probably some sort of line voltage booster, for use in rural areas where the pole transformers were literally miles apart and where the AC line voltage often varied a significant amount from day to night, or vice versa. I lived in a suburb of Cleveland at the time with reliable electric service, so had no use for the booster, but since it was in series with the power cord I left it where it was (didn't seem to affect the normal operation of the set).

That Capehart TV was the first in a long line of vintage sets I owned in my life, most of which were trash day finds that almost always needed very little to get them working again, until I finally I had enough money to buy a new set. My first vintage color set was a 1964 Silvertone 19" roundie I got from a neighbor of mine in my hometown. The push-pull on-off switch on the volume control and the circuit breaker were bad, but once these were replaced the set worked reasonably well ... until one day in the early 1970s when the video output circuit board cracked (I've told the story many times here in VK) and put the set permanently out of commission. I didn't know much or anything about repairing PC boards at the time (though I did try, with no luck, to repair the cracked-out tube socket), so I trashed it and reluctantly replaced it with a 1961 Philco b&w, which lasted until I found another Silvertone (rebadged Toshiba) 16" color set, in a trash pile in my hometown, around 1975. That set was the first color set I ever had that actually worked as soon as I got it home, and was the second in a short series of color TVs I owned. The rest, as the expression goes, is history.