My father recorded the news every night so he could watch it when he got home from work, so we had a VCR pretty close to the end of NTSC broadcasting.
I can recall at one point the last generation of rubbish units-- I think they were all basically the same basic Funai model with different badges by then Funai-- I had to open the lid and bend back some metal piece that was preventing operation, because they were so flimsy.
At an ambient relative humidity of 90%, the tapes themselves would become mouldy at an alarming rate. We did therefore check for mould before playing them, as this could have rubbed off onto the VCRs and then might have spread to other tapes.