TECHNOLOGY
Those Thrilling Days of . . . Radio
By Tom Blakemore
About 15 years ago my father showed up on my doorstep with a special surprise
for me from my Grandma’s house. “Do you remember that old radio
that Grandma had in her living room?” he asked.
Remember? How could I forget. Some of my earliest memories were of lying on the Oriental rug in her living room, listening to the last days of the Golden Age of radio and those classic shows like The Lone Ranger, Gangbusters, and Jack Benny. Many were already migrating to TV, but I was enthralled with the imagined door-knockings, car skids and other sound effects that made radio drama so special.
“Come on out to my truck, there’s something I want to show you,” my father said, and there in the back was Grandma’s old 1920’s-era Peerless AM. It was an old floor console model from the 1920’s, in a mahogany veneer cabinet, with an 8-inch Lextophone speaker and eight big glass tubes about the size of Coke bottles. My father thought I might clean it up and restore it – “It would look great in your living room” – and I often toyed with the idea over the years as The Peerless sat in my basement gathering dust.
Finally, last month I gave up the ghost. I needed the storage space as much as my dad did, so I started looking for ways to unload it. I checked out ebay, but I was wary of the cost of shipping this behemoth. So I googled around a few more clicks and discovered the Antique Radio Club of Illinois would be holding their annual convention and auction in early August in Bolingbroke, just a little southwest of Chicago.
The Peerless had not aged well. The speaker grill cloth was torn and deteriorating, the inside looked like a spider condominium and my cats at some point appear to have coughed up a fur ball on top that didn’t help the finish. Nonetheless, for the right collector, I knew this baby was a treasure.
The Antique Radio Club’s auction is famous in certain quarters. Last year, the hit of the show was an authentic Soviet-era sputnik, complete with serial number and a certificate of authenticity from the Russian government. The auction catalog this year ran to 6o items of all sizes and shapes, including my Peerless.
When I arrived, the parking lot was filled with cars from all over the Midwest, with license plates from Missouri and Colorado, Tennessee and Minnesota, Iowa, Ohio and Wisconsin. A huge crowd was already gathering, mostly middle-aged guys in Bermuda shorts and loud shirts walking around, but there were also a few women, apparently wives of the dealers.
Looking off across the massive parking lot there were radios extending to the horizon. Old ones, new ones, pre-WWI crystal sets and tiny jogging radios from the ‘90’s. Every type of radio that could be thought of was represented, as well as boxes full of dusty old tubes and manuals and schematics and microphones.
One
of my favorites was a 1940’s AM radio with a cream colored plastic case.
The intriguing thing about it was that the case had a dozen varying-sized
holes molded into the top that held two decanters (one labeled Bourbon and
the other Scotch), four shot glasses (with hula girls stenciled onto them),
a half dozen large highball glasses (complete with their own hula girls, of
course), and space for an ice bucket! The manufacturer called it “The
Porto Baradio”. The ultimate home entertainment center.
The first booth that I came to featured the handcrafted work of Chicago’s own E.H. Scott and his massive DX tuner, which Jean Shepard once called “The Ferrari of radio receivers.”
In his workshop on Ravenswood Avenue, Scott would custom build radios to an owner’s specifications: number of tubes to be used, bands available, shortwave or police bands, the whole works. He would build the radio without a cabinet then arrange for a cabinetmaker to come to your house (with the radio) to discuss how you wanted to enclose it.
This
particular DX tuner sported a large rotary tuning dial and twenty-three tubes.
But even more impressive, everything on it was polished chrome . . . the chassis,
the capacitor shields, mounting brackets, incredible.
Scott’s most famous model was the Allwave Superhetrodyne, sporting “full 13- to 550-meter reception using two stages of RF amplification, four stages of gain-compensated, continuously variable-sensitivity IF amplification and a 35-watt power amplifier driving a 12-inch bass speaker and two 5-inch tweeters” according to the literature.
In the 1930’s, one of these babies could cost more than your new car. A lot more. Hey, all of that chrome plating doesn’t come cheap. But true fans would pay any price, much as they do today for widescreen plasma TV’s.
The DX in Scott’s famous “DX Tuner” is a radio term that means “distant transmission” and, at the time, there were whole clubs devoted to “Dx-ing”—that is, pulling in far-off radio stations and logging the time and call letters.
I did a bit of this in high school, going so far
as to rig up a straight-wire AM antenna on the roof of my house to help gather
in the weak signals.
Sitting in the green glow of the radio dial with one hand on the tuner very,
very carefully and slowly turning it back an forth just so, the other hand
holding pen poised above the log sheets, I waited for those faint voices in
the night to appear from Canada or Omaha and some other distant place none
of my friends had heard.
A little further on I found another dealer who specialized in shortwave gear. This guy had all kinds of sets from very rare and old to kit models from the ‘60’s. I was also intrigued by the idea of shortwave as a kid; tuning in London or Moscow or Australia seemed like magic.
When I was young the most popular shortwave set was a Hallicrafter (another Chicago company with a factory first at 417 N. State St. and later on Indiana Avenue). One of my buddy’s fathers had a Hallicrafter and would sometimes tune in Singapore or Cape Town for us to listen to.
More impressive than his radios, though, was a display ad for Hallicrafter the dealer had sitting on a table in his booth. It featured a black and white drawing of a young Fidel Castro with beard bristling, standing before a gaggle of ancient RCA microphones, arm raised above his head, finger pointing to the heavens looking like he was in mid rant.
Below
the picture in bold black type it read: “Have You Ever Actually Heard
This Son-Of-A-Bitch?” Smaller type below: “With a Hallicrafter,
you can”. Beautiful. but not for sale.
I found myself falling deeper and deeper into the minutia of antique radio collecting when I realized that time had been slipping away and it was almost time for the big auction of Grandma’s old radio.
Under the auction tent, some of the other units up for auction were amazing – a gleaming Zenith Cathedral radio, an early 20’s all-band receiver in a cabinet that would have looked at home in Versailles (but in need of restoration) and enough others that I realized I was in for some serious competition.
The auction got under way and Harry the auctioneer did his mighty best to interest potential buyers in the worth and rarity of each piece. But a strange thing began to unfold. Nothing was selling. I guess it was just one of those days, but there wasn’t any action on anything. My radio came under the gavel and it did nothing to break the pattern. Harry’s opening bid was met with a roaring silence. Not a squeak from the audience.
I wandered off to see if one of the dealers might be interested in taking it off my hands. Same result. Not one had any interest in it, and a few took the time to explain that this particular model had no value at all. So, in the end, I donated Grandma’s radio to the club with any eventual proceeds going to fund next year’s convention.
In the grand scheme of things, I learned a valuable lesson that day. That it’s not the radio that makes radio so special. It’s the worlds that come to us through that box, the events we have the privilege of witnessing, the feelings we get from hearing stories well told, and the memories we attach to that special time in our youth when everything is new.
Or, as Lionel Cartwright and Don Schlitz sang in “I Watched It All (On My Radio”:
I had a six transistor
When I was a kid
Under my pillow
I kept it hid –
And when the lights went out
And no one could see
Over the airwaves the world
Came to me.
