[Milsurplus] Golden years of collecting?

[Pete Lancashire]

In the later 60's use to think the late 40s throught the 50s were but
being a youngster I did not consider inflation. Now days looking in
the back of 73 magazine or looking at the catalogs from Radio Row in
NY and calculating for inflation things were not all that cheap.

For me it was the late 60s up to say 1976/7. I lived near Philly
and there were three places that one never sees today. DOD sales
were much simpler back then, even still have a few of the catalogs
that would show up in the mail. Radio equipment was very very
cheap, anyone else been to the old Mechanicsburg depot ? Yep pallets
of R390A's did exist.

The second was GE Aerospace division. Test equipment every where
it took them a good 10 years just to dispose of all the stuff
they bought for the MOL project. And the week after the first
moon landing, anything to do with Apollo was sold off. Not to
mention the goodies related to the Spy satellites they were building.

Every month there would be a minimum of 100 to 200 lots.

The third was if you were into Naval stuff. One of the larges
ship breaking yards was in Delaware. A friend whow was high up
on the food chain there would let me in. The sad part was the
way they did it, a deck would be cut off and a wreaking ball would
be swung around in each of the compartments, then a magnetic crane
would lift the stuff out, if the radio room a scoop bucket.

Once in a while he would be able to go take what he wanted before
hand. Some of the ships might have been just updated a year or
two before. He had a very nice collection at home :)

Anyway .. stuff was very cheap at least in that part of the country.