Remember when your family got their first color tv?

[cmore]

I think it was about '70 or so. We would be out all day playing baseball
or something and would all quit and go in to watch Star Trek. In black and
white. We used to go to a friends house to watch the rose bowl parade
because they had a color set. I tried to get my dad to stay for the football
game but he said no, his friend didnt like football.

 

[gunnails]

27" Zenith, Ca 1972. Good times, I was the remote.

 

[sheepdawg]

In 1966, a Zenith. Elly May in color, Jeanie in color, I was 12 and it helped me to start noticing girls.

 

[arjay]

It was '66 or '67.The b&w had died about a year earlier and dad finally bought a new tv for us.Boy were we relieved! I think the only shows he watched were Ed Sullivan and Lawrence Welk [emoji1]

 

[Beemer-mark]

March 27th, 1984. MY company was going bankrupt and I saw one in Sears with the (then) new Atari 5200 game. Had a wife, 3 kids, was in my mid 30's and never so no use for a TV. But looking ahead at being unemployed for the 1st time in my life I pictured me playing Galaxa and drinking beer all day!

Got laid off on Friday, April 1st - went to work on the new job out of town on Monday. Wife and kids sure enjoyed that TV.

 

[cowart]

We got our first color set in the late 60s or early 70s - not sure of the exact year. We had to pretty regularly fiddle with the many small knobs on the back of the set to get a good picture. I also had to replace some of the tubes pretty often. I got pretty good at using the tube testing machine at the store.

 

[k22fan]

I remember getting our first black and white TV. We were the last house on the street to get one because family tradition is keeping debt to a minimum and the cloths washer and dryer and dish washer came first. I do not remember the day we upgraded to color but I sure did dream of Jeanie and don't remember her in black and white.

 

[whitestang]

My Dad was a Service Manager of an appliance store so we got one about 1967. Cartoons were much better on the color TV.

 

[mike from st pete]

Before getting the first color TV a bunch of us kids would stand in front of Vandergrift's Appliances and watch until they closed and turned them off. Sunday's Wonderful World of Color wasn't all that special in b&w.
Around 1966 we got a color TV at home.

 

[Iggy]

1996. That's when we bought a satellite dish. Before that, we only got one channel out of NE and it wasn't worth watching.

Finally got phone service that wasn't long distance on every call in 1999.
Got internet service at the same time. If we got an e-mail, we would start downloading it when we went to bed and it would be done by morning. Hell of a deal!!

Moved to town in 2000 and couldn't believe all of the modern stuff there was going on..

Keeripes, folk in town got mail every day instead of M-W-F whether you needed it or not.

 

[jscheck]

We never had a color tv growing up. In fact, when my wife and I got married in 1983 we were gifted Mom's old black and white. Didn't get color until a few years later.

 

[dswancutt]

By the time I hit the scene, July of 67, I think we already had a color tv. I know by the time I started watching tv the main set was color. Mom had a small tv in the kitchen that was b&w till the late 70's or so.
How many of you remember having the directional antennas. We had the controller in the living room and could tune in St Louis, Jeff City and Springfield Mo stations.

 

[Big Cholla]

I don't remember the exact transaction from B&W to Color, but I sure remember getting our first TV ever. It was probably 1955 or so. I would come home from school and watched the test patterns until Soupy Sales came on. He was live. Then Professional Wrestling live from a small studio in Las Vegas. Or maybe it was Wrestling first and then Soupy? We were living high on the old hog back. ...........

 

[Colokeb]

Forget Color B&W..Hockey story

Heck. We got our first TV, about a 17 inch B&W to be able to see the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953.

It was a MUST to be in High Society. We had to wait to get one.

Once in the house, the new TV introduced me to a new part of human anatomy.

Butt Cracks. They were on the TV repairman bent over on his hands and knees, pulling out all the tubes every month to fix the RCA, putting them all in his tester. Too bad he wasn't a gal.

The other thing was, I watched TV Ice Hockey on a Milwaukee UHF station. To say the picture was snowy was an understatement. A couple of years later the games moved to a VHF station like Channel 4. That is when I saw and discovered that hockey players were chasing a black puck around the ice rink.

As to color? Oh, I bought a used console in Eugene Oregon in 72. It was nice for about a year, and then it started on fire, right in the living room. Good thing we were watching.

 

[427mach1]

1969, cost my dad $500 (a lot of money back then) for a 25" color TV and it was all he could do to carry it into the house. That thing was HEAVY! I, too, remember the hardware store with the tube testing machine. I seem to remember getting cable before we moved from Seattle to Spokane in 1971. Seattle was in the middle of a downturn, Boeing laid off tens of thousands and the economy was in tatters. I remember the interstate sign asking "Will the last one out of Seattle please turn out the lights?" But I digress........

 

[DR505]

It was '66 or '67...a big Zenith cabinet with speakers on either side, and the tube was large compared to our B&W set. The B&W became the kid's TV. I too watched Jeannie parade around in her pink outfit and the green Orion slave girls seduce Kirk on Star Trek! Loved it.

Edit to add: The remote for the B&W was a pair of metal rods in a case (a little bigger than a cigarette pack) that were struck by a hammer when the button was pushed. Each emitted a different frequency sound to change the channel either up or down. If mom dropped a knife or fork in the kitchen the noise would change the TV channel!

 

[Maddawg1952]

I remember it like it was yesterday , 1967 Dad bought the 1st console color tv to watch the Red Sox in the World Series, The Impossible Dream Team, Was a 27" Motorola Console with a Channel Master Rotary Antenna on the roof. He also bought me a 7 transistor pocket radio with and earpiece so I could listen to it while I walked home from High School. Some of the games were in the afternoon then. Man the good old days!!!!!!

 

[Arik]

The first tv I remember was probably one of the first color tvs. It was probably 15 inches or so but it came as this big wooden monstrosity. Weighed like 400 lbs and could be used as a billiard table or ping pong table.

 

[Fat Frank]

1968. We had just moved from Kentucky to Clearwater, Florida. Things were looking up and life was good - at least for me as a 7 yr old.

I guess 1968 might not have been a real good year for some folks.

 

[2152hq]

1984,, my X bought it and charged it to my CC.