While the conclusion of it being replaced with an LED is obviously not what happened, I think it’s very possible that the sun was often orange for him when he was growing up, because of air pollution.

30 years ago, depending on where you lived, there were more cars on the road with less efficient fuel consumption, more people using fireplaces, more people burning trash, less regulation of various industries etc. Searching for images with the phrase “smoke pollution sun” will give you a lot of photos of orange suns, and they’re definitely not all altered for effect. I’ve seen red suns in real life too when wildfires are really bad near my area even though that’s thankfully rare.

We know not the sun itself that is orange, but in a polluted environment it certainly looks like it is - and if you don’t get a great education, I can see how you might think that’s the actual color of the sun.