[Hallicrafters] Philco "Radio TV Labs"

[carolew]

This is a great thread. It's fascinating to read about these legendary radio shops and the characters that ran them.

With the Lionel train collectors, the analog is Madison Hardware, a peculiar train shop in Manhattan run by a pair of even more peculiar brothers. Until the late 1970s, you could supposedly go in there and get parts and NOS trains dating back to the early 1920s. If the owners liked you, they would dig into their treasure trove (stored in several locations) and get you exactly what you asked for.

The only comparable radio shop I found was in rural Pa. The shop had been in business from the 1920s until the owner's death in the early 1960s. The place was shut down and boarded up for about 20 years. In the early 1980s, the new owner opened it up to sell the contents. There was a showroom that had 1950s TVs lined up as they had been in the '50s. A bit mildewed and moldy but NOS all the same.  There were 6-foot-tall display case fall of plastic portable radios.  Thumbtacked behind the counter were the tube substitution charts that the govt. put out when tubes and parts became scarce during WWII. In the service area, there were tubes going back to '26s, '27s and '45s. The old owner had apparently been the authorized Henry J. Kaiser car dealer for that area. There was a shed of NOS parts for those old cars. That was the one time in my life when I felt that I had entered a time capsule.

Joe Connor