Radio Free Dad

My dad was an audiophile. Not a small-time one, either. His life was sound and the machines that could bring it to the ear. As a teen he ran his own car stereo repair business, and a little later on he semi-successfully mounted a turntable, then a reel-to-reel tape deck on the front seat of his car. Not only did he appreciate radios, record players, and stereo components, he was like a world-class surgeon with them. One of his closest friends from the last twenty years of his life said he was not a tinkerer, but a master tinkerer.

His tinkering and his love of audio exploded into an amazing collection of radios. He found them at yard sales, thrift shops, on eBay, everywhere. Whatever their condition, he would patiently and lovingly bring them into working order and make them presentable. Then onto the floor-to-ceiling shelves in the family room they would go. His grandchildren and other young family members were given novelty radios as gifts when they would visit. We had a cleaning lady when I was a kid who was fooled by a Heinz Ketchup bottle radio and tore the top off of it. Among the possessions he left behind were easily a couple hundred radios just in the pipeline, waiting for him to restore them.

But for all the radios he owned, he never had a Catalin radio. As he explained to me once, Catalin isn't the brand or manufacturer, it's the type of hard plastic used to make the radio. Most of the radios made with it were done in art deco designs. He looked at them like they were Picassos. He had some hard plastic art deco radios in his collection, but he knew they weren't Catalin.

So why didn't he just buy one? For one thing, a cheap one can run $1000. And because just buying one from another collector didn't seem sporting I guess. He needed to unearth one.