Color Televisions were damn expensive, and most programming didn’t broadcast color until 1966 or 1967 or thereabouts. Bonanza was one of them, and to show it off they always had lots of color on the set, purple shirts, yellow dresses, green pants etc. I would say a Color TV was definitely a middle class thing until the early 1970s, yes.
I had an Aunt, a lefty college professor type, who hated Television. This was old school liberal, not to be confused with modern nutbars, although she was pretty bad. She had a fairly expensive 1960s B/W television, but it was on a cart, and not the centerpiece of her home. She’d wheel it out if there was something visitors wanted to watch, that was well into the 1980s until she died, mostly to watch Football games. I’ve since emulated her strangely enough.
You are right about most TV being black and white until about 1966. The Dinah Shore Chevy Show was (along with Bonanza) among the first in colour, and even in colour videotape circa 1959-1960. When I first saw footage of those shows, I was blown out of my seat practically, seeing people and other things from that time in that manner when I would have thought it was all black and white back then. And she had personally saved the tapes all of those years too.
There are other productions from that time done in early colour film or videotape that still survive, but what got chucked (to save space or that the networks did not learn about the value of preservation at that time) or taped over (to reuse the videotapes) just breaks your heart when you read about it.
My father in law was about as big a cheapskate as ever walked. Got his first car when he was 51. Although he enjoyed TV, he was damned if he was going to pay money for one. Finally garbage picked a black and white chassis that he got to working. Put it in his dank moldy basement. Years later I bought him a color set for his den and he lived happily ever after until age 92.
My dad got the first one in our neighborhood.
Everyone came by to see the color snow between channels