Today, we're going back to the 1960s to look at my first transistor radio.
We've looked at a lot of collectibles on this channel, and a lot of radios. But today we're going to look at the radio I got as a kid--my own first transistor radio. The way I got it, well, we'll get to that. What we're looking at right now is Christmas 1961, when my older brother got HIS first transistor radio. It's right there, wrapped up in one of those boxes under the tree. What he got was this radio, an American-made Motorola X23. My father bought it at the local TV and Radio shop near our house, a place that isn't there anymore but looked like this. You didn't get radios in a dime store or drug store in those days. No, those stores would be filled with transistor radios in just a few years, in the MID '60s, but in 1961 the radios were still fairly expensive, and there were not many places to buy them. If you're interested in this history, this book gives a good overview.
I'm always delighted to find an old transistor radio in its original box, and this would have been just exactly what my brother unwrapped on that Christmas morning in 1961, while I was trying to figure out what to do with my.. lump of coal. But of course this boxed Motorola is someting I found later and is not his original radio. THIS is my brother's actual original radio.
But when did I get MY first transistor radio? Well, I wasn't going to get a transistor radio. Not from my parents. As the middle child, I was expected to just wait until my brother tired of his and then graciously accept the hand-me-down. Like with all those sweaters. Except... he wasn't about to hand-me-down his radio. He never used it.. but he could see how much I wanted it,.. and it was HIS. Wasn't it bad enough that I had come along in the first place and ruined his status as an only child? Wasn't that bad enough.. or did he have to give up his radio too?!
Well, he finally did give me his radio, this one, when I had been collecting radios for awhile. In fact, I was 40 years old when I got this hand-me-down. And from the looks of it, with the rust on the dial and the missing nameplate, the radio might have been better off all along.. with me.
As a kid-- and this is me, by the way, on my seventh birthday-- .. as a kid I had a keen interest in how things worked,.. and in inventors. Now, where I lived--in the American heartland--that did not mean Da Vinci, Pasteur, or Marconi. No. Inventor meant Thomas Edison or Henry Ford. In 1962, when I was in the fourth grade, I read a biography of Henry Ford. That biography related the story that when Ford was a boy, he fixed a pocket watch for someone. He took the non-working watch, opened it up and looking closely noticed a bit of dust inside of it. He simply blew the dust out and the watch came back to life. And that, the story went, was how Henry Ford got his start. Well, I wanted to do that. I asked my grandfather if he had any old watches that didn't work. He thought awhile, then went off somewhere and came back with this. Wow! I thought. He said, "You can have this one. I used to wear this on a chain, but it stopped working a long time ago and I got this wristwatch." He started to show me his wristwatch but of course I was completely enthralled with this Elgin pocket watch he had handed me. I turned it over and tried to turn the back to open it. And sure enough the back unscrewed and soon I was inside the watch. It was fantastic, to me. I'd never seen anything like it. Though I could see no dust, I blew into the back of it anyway. The hairspring started to move the balance wheel back and forth, but of course I didn't know the names for these things back then. All I knew was that things had started to move inside the watch, and they kept moving. I tried to wind the watch but the stem wouldn't let me. Apparently, it was fully wound. Maybe,.. I thought.. it was just overwound and stuck. Maybe it just needed me to get things going.. I put the back back on and the watch ran all day and most of the next, until it wound down and stopped. I wound it, carefully, and not too tight, and it started right back up again. However little effort I had expended, however primitive were my methods, it could not be denied that I had fixed the watch.
So I put the word out to my fourth grade class at school that I could fix watches and, for good measure,.. radios. My teacher had faith in me, or was just messing with the precocious little person that I was, when she brought me three old table radios to fix. Radios that would have looked like these. I took them home, got the tubes out and tested them on that big tube tester down at the drug store. Sure enough, two of the radios had bad tubes in them and were cured by the replacement of those tubes. The third was, well, beyond me. But hey, two out of three is not bad. Al Kaline, my baseball hero, was the best hitter the Tigers had and he only hit in ONE out of three at bats.
Now, many of my viewers here ...