[Milsurplus] Re: More Fair Radio

[Hue Miller]

Back when there were regularly occurring auctions of surplus, 
you could stay in business, because you could replenish your stock.
Later on, it might have been a one-shot deal where you acquired a 
load, and sold it off. Thus a temporary venue like "Tent Surplus" in
Spokane or Pacific Surplus's temporary space rented on 1st Ave, 
Seattle. 
I used to work for a surplus place in Seattle, the one owned by
Mac MacPherson, who owned/ owns Radar Electric. We got our stock
from Boeing (maybe Boeing didn't have a surplus store back then. )
(They don't now, again. ) Or from reps from various local manufacturers
offering their overage. Or just from average people sometimes, bringing
in their own surplus collection. I think it became harder to get material
as time went by. I always wondered how the solid-state surplus places
stayed in business. You and i have to keep a certain $$ flowing in like
clockwork every hour. You cannot pay for your pork & beans by selling
a handful of resistors or transistors in an hour. 
Mac got his start, i heard, by getting a settlement payment for having
undergone an operation and it became the classic "wrong side" mistake.
His son Warren MacPherson was kind of a player in local politics, maybe
too suave for some gritty nuts & bolts business. Eventually he got tabbed
for some income tax indiscretion and actually did hard time. He later had
his own surplus store in Bellevue, WA, but i don't know the rest of that
story, i moved. I'll have to ask a friend about that. His store is where i 
bought a stack of the Carver car radios, ones built by Eton but with
too thin metal in the cassette drive so most of the radios failed to eject
your tape. Carver recalled them and stored the inventory for years,
but eventually dumped them. When i looked thru the stack at the store
( $10 your choice ) i picked out ones with a red tag saying something
about the cassette deck, so i could be pretty sure the electronics
was good. A quite nice radio, with LW-MW-SW-FM and FM diversity
reception. 
Hmmm.....i seem to be digressing a bit. To summarize, it has to be
or have been a fun job to have a surplus store, that's the way i 
remember it, but it sure wasn't very lucrative. I think Mac's store
was mostly a tax-writeoff deal for him.
At one point he had hundreds of spools of Litz wire, beautiful stuff.I wish i'd bought some of those myself.  -Hue
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