Showing posts with label antiques. Show all posts
Showing posts with label antiques. Show all posts

Saturday, December 17, 2016

1964 Personal Role Radio, new







If you suffer from geek allergies, now is your opportunity to move farther along the Internet Trail.

This post, however, will get us much closer to the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

What you see here is a brand-new Army "morale radio," right out of the box -- an R-1289 PRR receiver. Vendor: General Electric Company, Radio Receiver Department, Utica, New York, USA. Date of manufacture: September 1964.

The first wave of American troops in Vietnam would have gotten this from the quartermaster. I just got mine from eBay -- I was a little young to be sent to 'Nam in late 1964, being just 3½ years old at the time.

It's a strange thing, getting something that's 52 years old basically new out of the box. Call it a time capsule, which it is.

A TIME CAPSULE complete with an instruction manual, a schematic and an eight transistor radio in a moisture-proof canvas pouch. 

Moisture-proof is good for things being shipped to the jungle.

From what the Internet (and the eBay seller) tells me, this little GE model -- the P925 back in The World -- was the last of the military "morale radios," or "Personal Role Radio (PRR)" in Army speak. By 1964, after all, what young American didn't already have a transistor radio?

T.B. Player certainly did when he shipped out in '64.

This has been your Geek Minute on Revolution 21. We now return you to your modern, digitized programming.


Thursday, October 15, 2015

Tonight's vinylpalooza


I'm cheap enough that paying $15 for this 1959 stereo release gave me serious pause at the LP bins of an Old Market antique emporium.

On one hand, I'd rather find a gem for a song at an estate sale or something.

On the other hand, the records from this vendor are usually in marvelous playing condition.

On the third hand, a stereo rock 'n' roll record from 1959 -- the mono version of Bobby Freeman's Do You Wanna Dance album came out the previous year -- and from an indie label, no less. That's likely on the rare side, making the $15 price not a rip-off.

I'll say!

BEFORE LISTENING to this early-rock classic this evening, I did a little Internet price checking for the stereo version of Do You Wanna Dance . . . Jubilee 1086 for all you record geeks out there. And the low price I found it being sold for was something like $29.95. The high price (on eBay, of course) was . . . was . . . gulp! . . . $110. I understand a mint first pressing goes for $200.

Mine seems to be a second pressing. Sigh. I coulda been rich.

Now note that amid all this "What's it wurf???" nerd-o-mania, not a word was written about the actual music, which was great despite following the rock-album convention of the day for a hot act. That would be:

SIDE A
  • Cover something.
  • Cover something.
  • Cover something.
  • Original that'll never be released as a single.
  • Cover something.
  • Hit record we named the LP for.
 SIDE B
  • Cover something.
  • Cover something.
  • Original that you'll hear nowhere else. Ever.
  • Cover something.
  • Original that sounds exactly like the big hit on Side 1.
  • Cover something inspiring. Or something.
That is all. Good night, and good listening.

Tuesday, September 23, 2014

I. Need. This.


Treffen George Jetson . . . .

Electronics today come in basically one style -- black plastic crap. If you're lucky, you might find some various-color plastic crap. In the heyday of mid-century modern, that's not how radio- and TV manufacturers did business.

Especially not the Germans.


http://www.earlytelevision.org/index.htmlThis is a Kuba Komet console TV-radio-phonograph. This is art.

If there is a holy grail in mid-century modern design, this might be a contender for the title. I want this. I may need this.


I know I can't afford this. Word is that if you find one today -- and the Kuba Komet was insanely pricey in West Germany when it was new (from 1957-62) -- it'll set you back about $10,000.

And that's enough to make your bank account go kaput.

Thursday, June 26, 2014

Omaha Picker


You know who have the best jobs in the world? The American Pickers guys.
Put me in a thrift store or at an estate sale, and I turn into the Omaha version of Mike Wolfe and Frank Fritz. I see relics of a time long gone, and I start to see who the original owners were and maybe what they did.


What some folks see as junk, I -- like Mike and Frank -- see history you can touch. History you can make your own.

CALL ME continually amazed at the stuff folks throw out that I find in the record stacks at our neighborhood Goodwill.

Retail, this Glen Gray album would be worth a few bucks, maybe a little more. At the Goodwill, 99 cents. And look, it's autographed! That should add a few bucks to the value.

Welcome back to 1956.

I love this stuff. So does 3 Chords & the Truth.

Saturday, June 21, 2014

Then again, perhaps not


When Facebook's targeted advertising turns unintentionally really, really funny.

Mein Gott! Somebody maken ze Zenith go gesphincto!

Wednesday, May 07, 2014

This was an entertainment center


Did you know there were wireless remote controls in 1940?

There were -- for your top-of-the-line Philco radio-phonographs.

Did you know there were phonographs that worked kind of like modern CD players?



IN 1940, there were -- on your deluxe Philco radio-phonographs. The electronics giant's Beam of Light record players were as easy on your 78s as they were hard on your bank account at the end of the Great Depression.

When you dialed up the phonograph on your radio-frequency remote, the tone arm would come down on the record, a lightweight sapphire stylus with an attached mirror would lower onto the record and reflect a light beam off of the moving mirror to a photovoltaic cell, which would modulate electric current into electrical impulses that would be amplified and . . . voila!

Music.

If you love old electronics like I love old electronics, it doesn't get much cooler than this. The miracle of modern technology -- 70-something years ago!

And the glowing tone-arm head just looks cooler than hell. The whole thing is just cooler than hell.

Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Radio as objet d'art

How do you wake up in the AM?

This how we rise and shine à la maison de Favog. It's a 1951 Stromberg-Carlson clock radio I found on eBay.

Once upon a time, beauty in the things we use every day wasn't unusual. Televisions and radios were pieces of furniture that commanded attention, things that stood out whether they were in use at the moment or not.

Now, unless you pay a premium for the privilege, not so much. A TV is little more than a screen; a radio -- You remember those, right? -- is a plastic box with a digital display.

A CLOCK RADIO is your smartphone . . . or one of those unadorned little thingies you stick your smartphone or iPod into. And the sound quality is such that your low-bit rate MP3 file sounds the same as a high-bit rate MP3 file that sounds like a low-bit rate MP3 file.

Yecch.

No, I am a proud anachronism. I love beautiful anachronisms, and I use them whenever I can. AM radio. Vacuum tubes. Analog clock dials. Young people still can tell time on analog clock dials, right?

If the power goes out, I can reset the clock in a snap on this thing. Try that on your digital clock radio -- assuming you have one of those and not a little box into which you shove a smartwhatever. When I was a little kid, my parents used this for a clock radio.

YOU BETTER damn believe everybody woke up. WLCS PLAAAAAAAYS the hits!

If only I could get the new-old clock radio to pull in the Big Win 910 all the way from Baton Rouge, circa 1967. Or 1971 -- I'm not picky. I'd settle for Omaha's Mighty 1290 KOIL from the same time.

Unfortunately, it's just a great old AM clock radio, not a great old AM clock radio time machine. So KHUB in Fremont, Neb., it is . . . the only station on that venerable old amplitude-modulated band that has both music and news hereabouts.

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Not including sales tax; time machine extra


Yes, Tape Recording magazine! I do want to get the most practical use, fun and personal profit from my own tape recorder! Please show me how!

Here's my $2 for a year's subscription under your special money-back guarantee offer. I can't wait to get better recordings and greater use from my machine!

Sound on magnetic tape . . . a veritable electronical memory! What will science come up with next? Personal UNIVAC machines for the home? Television programs on a video record album?

Friday, April 19, 2013

Because I'm a geek . . .


. . . I get all excited about procuring a 1962 Pioneer FM multiplex stereo adapter to go along with my monophonic 1960 Voice of Music tuner.

I did have a pretty basic V-M multiplexer hooked up to it, but the Pioneer is sooooo much nicer. And better. And you can adjust the stereo separation -- cool!

I just lost you, didn't I? My wife's eyes glaze over at "FM stereo multiplexer."

But she did perk up  at ". . . and I got in on ebay for about $150 less than these things usually sell for."

Friday, January 25, 2013

The golden age of local television

Here's your media geekery du jour. Why don't we call it something pithy yet classy?

Something like "The Golden Age of Local," courtesy of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln College of Journalism and Mass Communication.

God, I love this stuff.
Loveitloveitloveitloveitloveit.

Honest to God. As if you couldn't tell.

In other words, sometimes just one blog post on this level of coolness just isn't enough. I mean . . .  GADGETS!
Cool old gadgets!

Artifact on artifacts


The journalism building at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln is something of a shrine to one-time tools of the trade, both print and broadcasting.

A museum, actually. One spread throughout the college, amid the classrooms and conference rooms and broadcast-production studios and computer labs. Turn one corner and there's a vintage RCA TK-30 black-and-white camera from the early days of television.

Like this one, dating from between 1946 and 1950.

Turn another corner, there's a wire recorder and a turntable that cuts transcription discs. And then there's that vintage television transmitter (?!) against a wall of the basement lecture hall.

But what had me reaching for the Geritol was how bloody many "museum pieces" I actually have used at some point. Before they were exhibit fodder.

NOT ONLY that, I own and still use a not-insignificant number of things in the Nebraska journalism-college exhibit.

That TEAC reel-to-reel tape recorder below is newer than the one I salvaged from an estate sale and still use -- which is much like what passed for "state of the art" when I was learning the craft of radio in high school.


I AM NOT sure what that says about me. Probably nothing good.

Good night, and have a pleasant tomorrow.

Thursday, December 13, 2012

Thursday, December 06, 2012

Exciting. Yeah, that's the ticket


It's exciting!

It's new!

It's an 8-track!

(crickets)

WELL, it also was 1966, and we didn't know any (CLUNK) better. After 1966, the main excite(CLUNK)ment  was when the damn tape jammed in the #&*~!+% 8-track player and $%#@&*! up the whole #$%!*#\ works . . . and why doesn't this tape sound nearly as good as the album???

Son of a bitch.

Pay attention, kiddos, you probably will look back on your iPod just as (ahem) fondly someday -- and by fondly, I mean wistfully derisive of the clearly inferior technology while longing for the days when it ruled the world. Life gets complicated.

And so will you.

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Back when cassettes ate their peas


"Who wants a tape-cartridge recorder?"

Not enough people, obviously, since I'll bet you've never seen one of these things. This RCA tape-cartridge recorder is a 1959 model, and it's kind of like a cassette deck, only bigger. With better fidelity, too, because it's basically a reel-to-reel machine with the reels in a great big cassette . . . er,
cartridge.

It never stood a chance when little cassettes came along in the mid-1960s.


The world is filled with Philistines! Any idiot knows that Beta the RCA tape-cartridge system is better, but noooooooo!


HEY! You can't argue with "four and one-half years of research."

Well, you can, but that just makes you an audiophobe. Philistine.

Monday, December 19, 2011

Magic lanterns speak in the night


Fire in a glass jar.

Lightning in a bottle.

The warm glow of magic in a darkened room.

This was radio once -- pictures of the mind riding electromagnetic waves through the ether, through glowing filaments in an airless bottle, out a loudspeaker and into your imagination through your ears.
These pictures are what that looked like . . . and looks like today, 83 years after this Radiola 18 originally took up residence in some 1920s radio household. Now it resides in our radio household, though what comes through the cone loudspeaker in 2011 is hardly as exotic as the offerings of 1928 seemed to entranced citizens of a newly established Radioland.

You've seen pictures like these
before in this space; they were from our other Radiola 18, the console set.


THESE PHOTOS ARE from the table model -- quite a large table model, to be sure -- which rests not on a table top, but instead on a wrought-iron stand that contains the set's large loudspeaker.

As I've said previously, radio once was an art form. Radios were art installations.

Now, radio is decidedly utilitarian, and barely that. But if you look hard enough -- and find something old enough that still works enough -- the art shines forth from a fire in a glass jar.

Lightning in a glass bottle.

The warm glow of magic in a darkened room.

Good night, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are.

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Pick a peck o' decked tech


Welcome to the Museum of Obsolete Objects.

Welcome to the online mausoleum where lies an ever-increasing collection of the stuff of my life. Well, maybe not the quill pen.

But I do possess a fountain pen!



Add the fountain pen to several turntables, a couple of 1950s record changers, typewriters of both the electric and manual varieties, tape decks (cassette and reel-to-reel) and various ancient drip coffee pots you won't find in the store anymore . . . and you've pretty much summed up my life. I am an obsolete object.

Right down to my journalism degree and mad radio-production skillz.

Guess what else made the museum.



Figures.


HAT TIP: The Creators Project.

Thursday, July 21, 2011

When radio was an art form


Computer chips are boring square blocks with a porcupine fetish.

Transistors are little blocks of plastic, metal and minerals.

Vacuum tubes are Dale Chihuly masterpieces of glass and wonder. The older they are, the more spectacular, these little jars of fire and light that bring the world wondrous sounds.


I WAS THINKING about that after our little video demonstration Wednesday of my 1928 Radiola 18 console. Really, that radio is so old, it was made when RCA was an American company.

A big American company at the forefront of an exciting modern world of sound . . . and eventually sight.

Magic waves flying through the ether.

An entire world flooding your parlor at the flick of a switch.

It was the birth of the first "golden age" of mass entertainment. The birth of the "network." The birth of a truly mass culture.


THIS OLD Radiola represents an age of technology that looked a lot more like art. It represents an age, too, where life was more Chihuly and less commodity.


I WAS born into the last echoes of that age -- the age of wooden cabinets and shiny metal trim and tail fins. The age of RCA and Zenith and Philco and Silvertone. The age of flying by the seat of your pants and artistic statements.

The age where radios meant a warm, orange glow in a darkened room, a certain "ethereal" aroma and friendly voices from far away on a summer's night.

I was born into the age of vacuum tubes. And I miss it so.

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Dancing the Charleston to heavy metal


When this radio was new, Calvin Coolidge was president of the United States.

The Jazz Age was in full swing.

Flappers were flapping in speakeasies, and everybody was swilling bathtub gin. Wall Street was still flying high, and brother most certainly could spare a dime.

Not that you'd need him to.
Yet.

This is an RCA Radiola 18, most likely in a custom cabinet. This is what you call heavy metal.

If you love vacuum tubes, this is your radio. See the big tube in the back? That's the rectifier, and it appears to be original to the set, manufactured sometime between summer 1927 and 1929. It's one of the earliest radio sets to run on "lamp current" --
that's 120 volts AC to you and me.

IN 1927, the norm was for your home radio (assuming you could afford one) to operate off of a couple of batteries -- one of them a big wet-cell not so different from what's under the hood of your car. That changed with the Radiola 17 and Radiola 18.

In 2011, this Radiola 18 still works just fine. A little arthritic, maybe . . . but aren't we all?

If you're not duly impressed
(and I add that, as far as I know, this old girl has never been restored), let me ask you something.

Do you think your iPod will still be functional in 2095?

Do you think you will?

Philco, my Philco


Seven decades ago this summer, Philco rolled out the new radios for the 1942 model year.

This was one of them.

Oh, the things it's heard -- Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt, D-Day, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, peace, war again, the space race and everything from swing to rock.

And 70 years later, it still has its antenna perked . . . listening for the next big thing. For it endures.

Let's see how your iPod's faring in 2081.

Good night, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are.



UPDATE: OK, here's a fancy, studio-ish photo of the old girl, taken just a while ago for your further edification.

Tuesday, May 03, 2011

The elite get to pica their poison

It seems that I've been retreating headlong into the past lately.

Part of it, I guess, is some sort of rebellion against the ugliness of today's prevailing culture . . . the ugliness of what passes for civilization today, period.

Another part of it is sheer weariness at the banality and stupidity of the popular culture that's actually popular.

Most of it is boredom. I find the present dull. Radio is dull. TV is dull, most of it. Too much of music is dull.

Drudge is tedious; cable news isn't. Isn't news, that is -- cable "news" is tedious with a capital "T."

Consumer products are boring, too, but it doesn't matter because they'll be obsolete in a year, anyway.

And whatever happened to great industrial design?

Maybe I'm not the only one bored, though. Maybe lots of people are, Maybe that's why typewriters are making a comeback. Vinyl records, too.

I just bought a 1959 Olympia manual portable typewriter. All it is is a printer with elbow grease, except that it doesn't "do" artwork, but it's a lot prettier than my computer. And unlike my computer, it will still be useful in another couple of years.

It doesn't crash unless I drop it, and it works just fine when the power goes out.

I can pound away at the keyboard with two angry fingers without worry. Nothing's going to splinter, and it sounds really cool.

I can feel my words going onto paper. I am connected. I am, quite literally, "in touch."

I can pound out a literary masterpiece much as I did three decades ago on a similar device in the ancient, clamorous and quite alive newsroom of
The Daily Reveille, when all of Louisiana State University could marvel at all the news I saw fit to pound onto an 8
½-by-11-inch newsprint sheet secure in the bowels of an ancient Royal.

Or Underwood. Or Olympia. Maybe Olivetti.


You'd be amazed how fast you can type with two fingers.
(Or maybe you wouldn't be. It's like texting with your index fingers and not your thumbs. Only much more forcefully.)

You'd also be amazed at how typing on an old Olympia, or Royal, or Underwood, or Remington is no fit pursuit for sissified fingers.

The whole process is
sooooooooo not postmodern. And that's my point. Postmodern is dull and vaguely uncivilized. We have become dull . . . and vaguely uncivilized.


WE ARE
out of balance. We, somewhere in our moral BIOS, know this -- thus our boredom. Thus our youngsters' newfound fascination with the low-tech hi-tech of their elders' youth. Thus, I am happy I found my 1959 Olympia at an Omaha estate sale for $5, grabbing a piece of how I used to "kick it old school back in the day" in advance of hipster-inflated pricing.

If I were in New York, for example, I would be so screwed. Exhibit A is this New York Times article from March 30:
Shoppers peered at the display, excited but hesitant, as if they’d stumbled upon a trove of strange inventions from a Jules Verne fantasy. Some snapped pictures with their iPhones.

“Can I touch it?” a young woman asked. Permission granted, she poked two buttons at once. The machine jammed. She recoiled as if it had bitten her.

“I’m in love with all of them,” said Louis Smith, 28, a lanky drummer from Williamsburg. Five minutes later, he had bought a dark blue 1968 Smith Corona Galaxie II for $150. “It’s about permanence, not being able to hit delete,” he explained. “You have to have some conviction in your thoughts. And that’s my whole philosophy of typewriters.”

Whether he knew it or not, Mr. Smith had joined a growing movement. Manual typewriters aren’t going gently into the good night of the digital era. The machines have been attracting fresh converts, many too young to be nostalgic for spooled ribbons, ink-smudged fingers and corrective fluid. And unlike the typists of yore, these folks aren’t clacking away in solitude.

They’re fetishizing old Underwoods, Smith Coronas and Remingtons, recognizing them as well designed, functional and beautiful machines, swapping them and showing them off to friends. At a series of events called “type-ins,” they’ve been gathering in bars and bookstores to flaunt a sort of post-digital style and gravitas, tapping out letters to send via snail mail and competing to see who can bang away the fastest.

IT MAY HORRIFY many of these hip young folk that they could be well on their way to becoming Catholic. Praying with rosary beads. Going to old churches with lots of statues. Lighting prayer candles. Saving prayer cards. Eating Christ.

What?

You know, tangibility. Making abstraction
tactile. Making it real.

Today, we have abstracted ourselves to death, in the sense of making everything theoretical and living one's life in a state of metaphysical detachment. Words, music, interpersonal communications . . . God. It's all the same.

They exist in the cloud. In cyberspace. As hypotheticals. Anywhere but here and now.

It's positively Protestant in the Calvinist-est sense, if not downright atheist.

MP3s and iPods and iPads and laptops are all very Protestant -- perhaps even megachurch in the Joel Osteen-est sense, only without the "praising" and stuff. They're functional, utilitarian, quite non-mystical (not counting the occasional incantation in hopes of warding off a Blue Screen of Death), promise you "your best life now," and we usually have a good explanation for how it all represents "progress."

Vacuum tubes, phonographs, records and typewriters, on the other hand, are Catholic. You have to touch them, and you get "smells and bells." Especially when you get to the right margin.

DING!

You can't hear your favorite music without first touching it. You have to do something tangible beyond trolling a menu. And you get to see what you hear -- the music goes round and round, then it comes out here.


You can't express your thoughts without touching them. They are literally without form until you strike a key, which then hammers your point home -- to a sheet of paper. Which you lovingly pull from the machine and send into the great beyond, out of which it emerges to be touched -- and read -- by another human.

All very Catholic, we ancient believers in the "communion of saints," "smells and bells," statues of our heroes in the faith . . . and in feasting on the body and blood of the Creator of the universe and Savior of us all.

Good Protestants have Jesus in their hearts. We Catholics have Him in our stomachs, too. See John 6.

iPods vs. phonographs. MacBooks vs. typewriters.

MY COMPUTER and my hard drives full of music are expediencies.
Tools. Purely functional and utilitarian.

My typewriter and my old record changer -- my old records -- those are affairs of the heart. I've known that since I was 4. Some young folks are just discovering it.

Sometimes, being in touch requires being
in touch.