I finally got across the street to take those pictures at Piexx, the electronics repair shop in Hillsboro, NH. Their inventory of antique radios and televisions is not to be believed.
What you’ll be seeing below are some of the pictures I took during a quick outing. I’m looking for image art I can use on The Classic Science Fiction Channel. The idea is, instead of clicking a menu entry, you’ll turn on the TV or the radio, wait for it to warm up, get a test pattern and then, by turning the dials, you’ll be able to tune in on the show you want to watch or listen to.
(Actually, I’m hoping to put a whole living room scene up on the screen that will also let you operate a reel-to-reel for audio books or pull a volume down off the bookshelves.)
Here’s the television I’ve selected. Imagine it with the following voice over: “We control the horizontal…from the inner mind to THE OUTER LIMITS”
You’ll notice that this TV does not even have a UHF dial. If you’re asking – ‘what’s that?’, or of you’re wondering why anyone would need a dial for a TV (or better yet, wondering how the heck they can fit 999 channels on a dial), you’ve probably wandered into the wrong place. Go back to kicking whores in GTA and leave your betters elders alone!
Now when it comes to radios, I needed something with a lot of dials and ‘tunability’. There are a lot more radio programs than there are TV (at least on TCSFC) so I need a lot more buttons and dials. There are quite a few contendors (I haven’t even begun to mine the depths of Piexx), but I’m pretty sure that the following is what I’ll be using –
I think I remember Pilot radios. I’ll have to ask my dad about it – it just might be the same company, if different model, that I listened to The Shadow and The Lone Ranger on.
That’s probably the radio I’ll use, but there are certainly some other ones I’m considering, such as this one.
That rotary tuning dial is so old skool it looks like it belongs in a B52, not sitting in the living room. The toggle buttons on the side are pretty nifty also and would probably be fairly easy to photoshop and animate.
Unfortunately the storage location for this (and a couple of the other items) was so cramped that I couldn’t fit the whole thing into the shot. This radio is a floor model and stands about four feet tall.
Here are some others:
This is a Gundig Master.
Before the Sith and the Jedi, there were the Gundig. They were all trapped by the evil Edsels in their horrific Dashboard of Timelessness device, which is why Lucas had to go with Sith and Jedi. There’s a little bit of Star Wars pre-history you probably didn’t know about.
This is the Meteor. Good name and the design is perfectly dreadful 50s kitsch, but there’s no display unfortunately.
These next two are also floor models. The fancy woodwork was required because the radio used to be a central feature of most household living rooms or dens. They’re also pretty ‘blah’, because the designers didn’t want to distract you from the visions that were going on inside your head.
These next two are REALLY old. You can tell because they look REALLY REALLY old. Ancient. Decrepit. Aged. Antique. Obsolete. CLASSIC.
This is a Westinghouse Home Entertainment Center in a Box. This thing has so many dials and that really cool handle. I think its actually a camouflaged portable power supply for Frankenstein’s monster.
Note the handy-dandy installation guide pasted into the lid.
Here’s a blow-up:
It identifies this as an Aeriola Receiver, from the Westinghouse Radio Corporation. Note that it illustrates how to hook the thing up and attach it to your antenna.
People have obviously been in mess-o-cables hell for a looong time.
It looks like it might actually have been put together to compete with product that our good friend Hugo Gernsback used to market. Hugo offered kits that you assembled yourself. Westinghouse seems to have been after the non-geek side of the market.
Here are a couple more:
(This space reserved for humorous segue)
Speaking of cars, SUVs and vans, here is a pic of my all-time favorite vehicle. I want one badly. Problem is, the company that made them has been out of business for so long hardly any information about it has made it to the web. It was manufactured by the Linn Coach & Truck Corporation. Those folks made a half-track for logging in the woods, but that half-track is about all you can find on the web.
The plow isn’t part of the vehicle. This one is parked about two blocks over from my house in an outdoor museum called the Kemp Truck Museum. Mr. Kemp died a few years back and no one else seems to be too motivated about doing anything to preserve the enormous collection of Mack and other trucks he collected. (Hint: I’d be happy to curate and fund raise for the price of a Linn…).
Here’s another pic of a few (very few) of the other vehicles at Kemp’s:
If you’re into old fogey stuff, New Hampshire sure looks like the place to be, huh?
The Linn van was built in Oneonta NY by a company founded by HH Linn after he swopped stock of the Morris, NY tractor firm of his name to Republic Truck in 1927, effectively selling out his control. He then organized the Oneonta firm to produce trailers in 1929, such as the one wheel wonder U-Can-Back he bought the rights to in Paris. After his death in a plane crash July 3, 1937, Linn’s widow brought in Arthur R. Perkins of Unadilla Trailer Co., New Berlin, NY to run the Linn Trailer Co. and he almost immediately began work on front wheel drive vans, which were on the market by 1939, at which point he negotiated to buy the firm, but lost control due to financial issues after WW2. They built a lot of trailers and vans for the military, mobile dental units, radio, etc. The front wheel drive was a 6 cyl. Hercules engine and Morse silent chain transfer case, with a quickly interchangeable power unit so that fleet owners could keep a spare on hand. The rear axle was a torsion bar arrangement so you could have a low floor and greater headroom. Great American Industries took over the firm by 1948, however after a battle with the union in 1952 they closed their doors. You can see one of their TV units in the background of an old “The Fugitive” episode. Due to the military contracts they had unfinished at the time a similar sounding name, “Lyncoach” was taken by former officers and they reorganized to fill those orders, then took on more, finally aquiring the Reynolds aluminum body line they expanded by 1973 to a plant in Troy, AL, then closed their plant in Oneonta. My father was in a RSM unit in Alaska during the Korean War that had the tractors waiting but no radio trailers yet, which he didn’t see until he was back home, and saw them waiting for delivery at the side of the trailer plant in Oneonta. My grandfather worked in the plant and had his spine collapsed when a worker fell on some aluminum sheets and knocked the jackstand out from under a trailer frame, the lawyers settled out of court for enough to pay the hospital and lawyer fees. The Linn tractor company in Morris had built their last new tractors in 1952, but factory serviced them and sold parts until 1960, other than building some trailers for use with Linn tractors all they shared was a common founder. Paul Smith out in the desert of CA was the last big collector of these vans but I havn’t heard from him in years. I know there were two similar vans to that shown, outfitted as mobile jails, down in CT somewheres not too many years ago.
Rene.
thanks very much for providing that information – I’ve not really been able to find anything significant on the internet.
Do you happen to know anything about the model in the picture – what it might have been used for, etc?
And – any idea what it might be worth?
[…] a lead and his search picked up on the Kemp Truck Museum entry on their site and followed it here.(Here is the comment received from the Linn Truck Obsessors – rather long and appreciated history of the […]