Our first color set was won in a Lions Club raffle
It was 1967 and I was in sixth grade. My father and I had gone to a hockey game (San Diego Gulls, minor league team in the Pacific Coast league). During our absence, someone from the Lions Club called my mom to inform her that we had won the grand prize in the Lions Club raffle, for which my father had (as a nominal member) dutifully purchased $20 in tickets.
She drove over to pick it up from the appliance dealer who donated it, and they loaded it into the car for her. When we came home, she said "we won a color tv and it's in the station wagon, why don't you bring it inside?" and of course we thought she was joking.
It was a GE 19 inch table top model with a cart. Although we had coax cable, making the portability of the tv a nonissue, the cart still functioned as a free matching stand, and there was a shelf underneath to store books and magazines. The existing tv was a b&w Zenith which fit in a built in bookcase in the wall....the new set was too large to fit in the bookcase, so the cart was a nice addition.
Until then, the very first time I ever saw color tv in operation was at a hotel lobby in Sun City, CA en route to Palm Springs. I had a relative in LA with a broken color tv but never saw it work. Within a year or two, a family around the corner, who were more affluent than my family, had a Zenith tv with legs in the parents' bedroom, so very occasionally I saw a color program there.
Color programming was more limited until the 1960s. It cost more to produce a program in color, so sponsors didn't want to pony up the extra money unless there were enough homes watching the enhanced picture. In some cases, the decision of which channel to view at a given hour was influenced by whether or not the program was shown in color. Some of the networks, ABC in particular, did not fully convert prime time shows to color until c. 1967. This explains why episodes such as "Bewitched" are B&W in earlier seasons and then switch to color. "Donna Reed", which ended in 1966, remained B&W to the end. Some shows such as "The Lucy Show" were filmed in color but originally broadcast in B&W, probably because they realized the residual fees for reruns would eventually justify the added cost in the future when more homes had color.
The first color tv that we PURCHASED was a 19 inch Hitachi table top unit, to replace the dead GE set, in 1972. About 350 dollars, and now prices were dropping quickly, and at this point color tv was now in more than 50% of US homes. Even so, when I bought my first personal tv set in grad school, color was still priced over $200 and out of reach for me at the time, so I bought a 13" B&W for $59 on sale at a discount house. A good portable 13" Mitsubishi color set, which my parents bought for the guest bedroom, would have cost close to $300 c. 1980.
The Hitachi died after 16-17 years faithful service. My parents assigned me the task of buying a replacement (they paid for it but I had to do the research and legwork) and we bought a 19" tabletop Mitsubishi for $500. The quality was so superior to the old Mitsubishi that my parents never questioned the added expense. This set slogged on to the mid 1990s, when it was replaced by a 25" Magnavox. It still works fine but my parents are now itching to move on to the HD era.
