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Saturday Night Radio
What a beaut! (The gal’s not too shabby, either!) Behold the stunning Truetone Radio.
Take a look at the fine array of Truetone radios in the 1939 catalog below (and in the link above:)
So what kind of show shall we listen to on our Truetone radios? I know! How about some great music from the legendary Duke Ellington live from the “Roof at the Ritz” atop the Ritz Carlton Hotel Boston? ….
That was fun.
Good stuff.
Lovely.
Keep that dial tuned to A-I-A-C!
Western Auto outsourced manufacturing to a number of companies. These companies also made radios for other retailers, with the result that the only difference in some was the Truetone labeling. They are still beautiful.
My grandparents had one of those Teledial consoles (2nd image), and my grandfather in particular spent many hours listening to it. Sometime in the early 70s it gave up the ghost, and as the family electronics nerd I was tasked to fix it. By then the burnt out vacuum tube (it was almost always the tubes) was obsolete and near unobtanium, so the fix involved building an adapter that would let a more ‘modern’ equivalent tube connect to the old socket. Harmony was restored and I never told them what I’d done to the innards of their baby.
When I was a little kid, we had something which looked a lot like “The Ambassador” from the linked 1939 catalog. But it must have been an earlier version, as it did not have “electronic” controls, but rather buttons in slots that you pushed down to mechanically move the dial back and forth.
When you tuned to the shortwave band, my brother and I called it “The Elephants Are Coming”, as it sounded like some sort of stampede.
It also had a weird signal strength eye sort of like this:
It also had a record player in the hinged top (like “The Ambassador” seems to have) with an arm that weighed a ton.
We also had a radio that looked a lot like the one below that 1939 catalog link, only red plastic, not black. Listened to a lot of Jack Benny on that radio.
We must have been a Truetone household.
There’s a few retro bluetooth speakers I like, haven’t pulled the trigger on one but I will at some point (I already have two lying around the house, I don’t really need another one but I dig the action).
The old radio sets triggered me.
Retro 1:
Retro 2:
OMG . . . I think we have one! I’ll have neutral observer snap a pic and send it to me, then I’ll post.
If I remember . . .
Update – I remembered:
It doesn’t work. I went to the local Walgreens and asked the young lady behind the counter where the vacuum tube tester was. I managed to leave the store before she finished dialing 911. And I wasn’t even wearing an overcoat . . .
Listened to several of those radios back in the 40’s and some of the same programs were on when we listened going skiing in Colorado on rope tows, eventually t-bars in Loveland basin. Then they were no more when we could use chairs in Salt Lake and Teton basin. Radio plays a different role now and while most TV is garbage good stuff abounds but you have to search through lots of crud. That’s pretty much everything. I suppose we just coasted and enjoyed good stuff and freedom because we’d inherited it. Now we have to make choices and exert energy because the momentum, the mob, the drift is top down, driven by a different culture; not a new culture, the same one that kept the world where it had always been.
“Saturday Night Radio” promoted to the Main Feed! How exciting! Thanks, everybody.