[Hallicrafters] The Howard Company - with the response this time

[Gerry Steffens]

Ignore the first post as it had no message.

Howard was a major player in both broadcast receivers and communications 
receivers prior to W.W.II. The Howard Radio Company was located at 1731-35 
Belmont Avenue in Chicago. They also built communications receivers for 
Sears under the Silvertone name in addition to radios for McMurdo Silver. 
The Silvertone Precision which is very rare is a Howard in a different case. 
Howard also built receivers for Hallicrafters for a time in the early 
1930's. I believe they made their last broadcast receivers around 1948 and 
were out of business by 1949.

Despite the copper chassis and really neat art deco styling, these appear to 
be really awful receivers.  The 440 performance is pretty disappointing 
despite being a 12 tube receiver. They are really neat to look at however. 
Other problems are chassis corrosion and corrosion of the slide rule dial on 
most of the 430 through 438 series of receivers. It is rare to find one of 
these with a really clean dial. If you have ever worked on the 430-438 
series, they are quite difficult to remove from the cabinet and just as 
difficult to reassemble.

During a W.W.II under a 1942 military contract, Howard manufactured the 
BC-779 version of the Super Pro SP-200 series for Hammarlund. The "made for 
Hammarlund by Howard" wording suggests that Hammarlund subcontracted 
manufacturing to keep up with the high wartime demand. From photos, it 
appears that the Howard built Super Pro's are all in military gray, while 
some Hammarlund-built models were in the civilian black crackle finish, with 
a military name tag added.

The above is some of my opinion and some borrowed from a couple of web 
pages.  I have followed Howard because of its entanglement with McMurdo 
Silver, Silver Marshall, Silver Marshall Manufacturing (the Bill Halligan 
owned revival of Silver Marshall) and Hallicrafters   I primarily collect E. 
H. Scott, McMurdo Silver and Hallicrafters general coverage radios. 
Currently have about 300 radios if you throw in the Zenith Transoceanics 
too.



Gerry


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