Here's a pic of my 1964-ish (the pots are dater the 36th week of 1964) Silvertone 1457! It took me a few days to post this because I was busy making it fully functional.
Though it has quite a bit of patina, it all worked well except the neck pickup. I disassembled that today, peeled back the tape and found that one of the leads was no longer connected to the coil. This was a fairly daunting task, but with some patience and 7x magnification visor, I was successful.
Yes, the strings are biased way to the bass side of the neck. It won't move far enough to correct it and playability is not affected, so it's staying that way.