Major find in Chicago

[Jeffhs]

That TV may not be an RCA Wingate color set, but I still like the looks of the cabinet; it is one of the few TVs I've seen with doors over the front. The last set I saw in a cabinet with doors was a 1950s-vintage RCA KCS-47, IIRC, which our church had in a back storage room. My dad was in our church choir, and I used to go to rehearsals with him; I'd sit in the back and watch that TV while rehearsals were going on. That set worked amazingly well for being (at the time) some twenty years old. Thinking about it now, I wonder whatever became of it. It's probably long gone by now, as the church has gone through some major renovations over the years, and I really haven't been back there since I moved nine years ago.

Too bad if the set has been trashed, as it was a b&w roundie with a 16GP4 (IIRC) CRT. The only other such TV I've ever seen in my life was a 1951 Majestic, also in a very nice wood cabinet with doors, with three pulls on each door. I inherited the chassis of that set when my aunt moved in the late 1960s, but she got rid of the cabinet in the trash before she left town.

The TV chassis, however, worked very well for its age (twenty years or so), bringing in all three (at the time) Cleveland network television stations beautifully in my area (then a Cleveland suburb some 33 miles from the area's TV transmitters) using only the attic antenna in my house. I kept it in the basement, atop an old (1955, IIRC) Crosley "Super V" 21" console which had been my folks' second TV. The Majestic also had a phono input with the usual switch on the front of the set; I remember having to be very careful when moving that switch so as not to contact the sides of the exposed CRT (I think I did get shocked, once, by that tube, when I forgot myself and my hand innocently [!] strayed to the edge of the CRT. Believe me, I learned a lesson that day I have never forgotten!)

Those b&w roundies, including my Majestic chassis and the KCS-47 I mentioned, had a picture that looked, with the chassis outside of the cabinet, for all the world like today's 16:9 HDTV pictures on a 4:3 analog set. I believe those b&w sets were designed on purpose to produce a picture that only filled the screen partially; the cabinet had a mask that made the resulting picture look normal.