Wow, I can't resist chiming in on this...
I was born into an engineering town. Around here in the early '60s, a lot of people had Philco sets as Philco was semi-big in the aerospace industry at the time. The set my parents had when I was born was a 19-inch Philco. But my dad decided he liked Zenith better and in '62 or '63 he bought a Zenith 21-inch and gave the Philco to his father. I remember watching the Philco at my grandparents' house and it had lousy contrast (even by the standards of the day), with medium-gray "blacks". Every time I watched it I wanted to turn the contrast all the way up, but if my dad was there he wouldn't let me, as he was under the impression that this was bad for the set somehow. (And maybe he was right... he's the engineer that was raised on tubes, not me!)
The Zenith had UHF, which was necessary here since the FCC would not license any VHF stations in this area. Actually, it had become mandatory for TVs to have UHF by 1962, but there was a trick that makers used for several years since a lot of people in major metro areas had no use for UHF at the time and didn't want to pay the extra cost. The trick was that when the factory shipped the TV, they shipped the UHF tuner in a separate box. If the TV went to a market that had UHF stations, the dealer would install the UHF tuner when the set arrived. If not, the dealer would give the purchaser the option of omitting the UHF tuner in exchange for a rebate, and if the customer took that, the dealer sent the UHF tuner back to the factory for a credit. I think the FCC finally put a stop to this in 1965.
The UHF tuner on our Zenith was a radio-type continuous turning tuner, with a gear and clutch deal. If you just turned it, it moved rapidly. If you pushed it in, it turned slowly, so you could zero in on the channel. People today don't realize that watching TV involved a certain amount of work back then. In addition to getting up off the couch whenever you wanted to change channels or adjust the volume, you had to periodically get up to adjust other things. Tuners drifted and you had to adjust the fine tuning, especially UHF tuners. Or the TV would lose sync and you had to adjust the horizontal or vertical hold. The Zenith had most of its controls hidden behind a little door that ran the width of the cabinet under the CRT. The door opened downward and you were presented with ten or so trimpot shafts of various colors sticking out through a panel. (Or not... you had to use a screwdriver to adjust some of the less commonly used ones, like the linearity controls.) They were all labeled on the inside of the little door.
The Zenith needed servicing once a year or so, which was not unusual back then. The first step was always to take the back off, pull all the tubes, and take then down to the drug store to use their tube tester. My Dad always let me go with him and operate the tube tester, which I thought was great fun. We'd identify the tube that was bad, and then we'd go get someone to unlock the cabinet under the tube tester where the new tubes were stored, and find a replacement. A couple of times the tube we needed was out of stock, and then we'd be off on a wild goose chase around town to find one.
If replacing a tube didn't fix it, it was time to call for service. The service man usually tried to work on the set in home first. I recall the first time I saw a TV service guy bring in his oscilloscope and hook it up. I thought the scope was the absolute coolest thing ever. All those knobs and buttons and lights, and cool drawings on the screen! I wanted to be a TV repair guy when I grew up, just so I could have one. They usually managed to fix the TV at the house, but I do recall it being hauled off to the shop once. It was gone for a week. Having no TV in the house for a while was not a huge deal back then; there were plenty of other things going on.
Like many people, we had a rooftop antenna with a rotator. But due to the ongoing UHF situation (the geography of this area is singularly unsuitable for UHF), cable started here very early. We had it by 1966, and then the UHF tuner was only used to pull in one area station that wasn't on the cable (for reasons that are still not clear to me). That made the rotator unnecessary, and my dad gave it to my mom's brother who installed it at my maternal grandmother's house.
We moved to another house in 1968, and my dad didn't put up an antenna at the new house; we just used the cable, which by now was populated with several out-of-town stations so we weren't missing any of the networks. The place where the Zenith went was in the basement rec room, along the wall where the fireplace hearth ran the length of the wall. The hearth wasn't quite wide enough for all four legs of the Zenith to stand on, so after pondering the situation for a while, my dad simply removed the legs and sat the cabinet directly on the hearth. We watched the Apollo 11 liftoff and moon landing on that set in 1969.
My first views of color came in 1968. At our new house, one of our neighbors had bought a teensy (11" or so) color set that they had in their basement. I recall nothing about it other than that it was color and it was small. However, my great-uncle purchased what must have been a top-of-the-line Admiral set at about this time. The first thing I remember watching on it was a college football game, and my great-uncle was enraptured by it. The set had some interesting quirks and features. In addition to the usual color intensity and tint controls, it had a white balance control. You could make it more sepia or more blue. I don't recall ever seeing another set in the pre-microprocessor era with that. Another thing I recall about the Admiral was that when you turned it off, instead of the CRT beam shrinking to a point and then fading out, it briefly made a very distinctive three-leaf color pattern as it faded away. My great-aunt still had the set when she died in 1997, but it was no longer working; the CRT had lost vacuum.
The Zenith finally went out in 1970, given to a family friend who installed it in his lake cabin. We got an instant-on RCA XL-100, our first color set. And they weren't kidding about "instant"; when you pressed the power switch (a big chromed bar that ran across the top of the control panel), BAM! it was on. The CRT voltage came on so abruptly that it produced an audible "snap" when you turned the set on. The UHF tuner on this one was a clunk-clunk tuner; each "clunk" selected a band of three channels. You had to set the band to the proper channel once (by turning and turning and turning the fine tune) and then it would remember that setting. This worked acceptably well since, by this time, the FCC had realized that they couldn't assign adjacent UHF channels and were keeping them all six channels apart. The secondary controls were mounted in a weird tilt-out panel which is hard to describe in words. Imagine a metal box which, when closed, has its front face flush with the front of the TV. It's hinged at the front bottom edge. When you pull on the front top edge, it tilts forwards and down, and the controls are mounted on the top of the box which is exposed. By this time horizontal and vertical sync circuits had improved to where they didn't usually need to be fooled with, but the color did require frequent adjustment.
And yes, they sucked electricity. With the RCA at least, it was more than just keeping the tube heaters lit; my understanding of that set was that all of the circuity was powered all the time, except for the CRT drive voltage and the audio output amp. After we'd had it for a few months, my dad started unplugging it at night. My dad had that set until it did in fact catch fire one day in 1976. I wasn't there at the time, but my dad was watching it when it happened. He told me that the fire didn't have anything to do with the instant-on feature per se; it was a problem with the power switch, which was under-spec'ed for the current it was handling. He hot-wired the set so it would always be on when plugged in, but shortly after he got rid of it.
