Radios From the Golden Days of Airwaves Now Prized Items

Mention such names as Air Pal, Streamliner, Melody Cruiser and Lumitone to Bob Breed and you’ll see a glimmer appear in his eyes, faint at first, then becoming brighter and brighter until he’s glowing like a hot vacuum tube.

Within moments, Breed’s entire face is radiating with the excitement he used to feel as a child, growing up in the post-Depression 1930s and ‘40s, when the Air Pal, Lumitone and other relics from the Golden Age of radio brought his nightly bedtime stories in the form of the “Lone Ranger” and “Suspense Theater” broadcasts.

“Some of those old radio shows would chill your blood,” Breed said. “Even though you knew it was just actors standing in front of a microphone, you’d be so wrapped up in the story that it was almost like you were under a spell.

“Everything was so real, so vivid, as though you were there. That’s a feeling you just don’t get from television--and that’s why we considered the radio to be our best friend.”

It was the desire to recapture those treasured memories, a desire fueled by the birthday gift of a 1932 Philco wood “cathedral” model radio someone gave him, that prompted Breed to begin collecting and restoring antique radios 14 years ago.

Today, the 58-year-old San Diegan’s modest home is cluttered with more than 300 vintage sets. Most of them are from the 1930s and ‘40s, and virtually all of them are valued at more than 10 times their original selling prices.

There are majestic wood Philco cathedrals and Zenith consoles, around which families used to gather during the Great Depression and listen, spellbound, to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats.

There are early plastic Fada and Stewart-Warner table-tops in a wide array of marbled colors and Art Deco styles; a novelty set with a silhouette of Peter Pan plastered to the speaker grille, and gimmicky radios shaped like lamps, broadcast microphones and even whiskey bottles.

While Breed is somewhat of a fanatic when it comes to old radios, he is just one of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of collectors around the country who wouldn’t think twice about shelling out $200 for a 1932 Philco cathedral or a 1947 plastic Fada table-top that you might not take a second look at if it was on sale for $2 at a local flea market.

According to the 1987 edition of Schroeder’s Antiques Price Guide, “Vintage radios represent a field of collecting” that has become increasingly popular in recent years. In the last decade, radio-collecting clubs have been started all over the United States, including the 600-member Southern California Antique Radio Society (SCARS), which sponsors quarterly swap meets at the Lockheed Aircraft Recreation Center in Burbank.

“The reason old radios tend to hold more appeal to collectors than, say, old vacuum cleaners is that they were entertainment devices, and people can always relate to things that entertained them when they were young,” Breed said. “You can’t get too enthusiastic about an old vacuum cleaner, or a sewing machine, but an old radio amused you, and, prior to TV, it was all you had in the way of home entertainment.”

Besides nostalgia, Breed said, he believes the growing interest in old radios “is due to their style, their attractiveness. It’s like everything else: a new Toyota Celica is a much better car than a 1941 Ford, but it just isn’t as stylish, as appealing to look at.”

Dick Griset, another local radio collector, agrees.

“Good style is good style, and it will last forever,” said Griset, who keeps his dozen-plus vintage sets from the 1930s and ‘40s in his downtown office, where he works as a property manager.

“Back then, radios were a lot more interesting to look at than the ones today. There was much more of an emphasis on aesthetics, with excellent cabinet work and ornate designs. When I first started getting into old radios a few years ago, it was because they reminded me of my youth. I still remember listening to a short-wave station from Tokyo on Dec. 6, 1941--the night before Pearl Harbor--on the family Philco console.

“But today, I just collect whatever I like, whatever looks good.”

Style is also why Jack Rebell, the chief engineer at San Diego radio station KSDO-AM/FM, began collecting antique radios in the early 1970s.

“My wife and I were at an antique-car auction in Newport Beach, and in the lobby of our hotel there was a glass case filled with old radios, including a mint-condition Philco cathedral,” Rebell said. “I said to my wife, ‘What a beautiful radio,’ and since it had a name on it, I called the owner a few days later and asked him whether he would part with it. And he did, for $110.”

Today, Rebell’s collection consists of more than 30 vintage sets, dating as far back as an early 1920s Atwater Kent “breadboard,” with open circuitry and a remote speaker.

Most, however, are cathedrals from the 1930s manufactured by Philco, RCA, and Zenith. Over the years, he’s picked them up at garage sales, swap meets and antique shops; many are prominently displayed in his KSDO office on Murphy Canyon Road.

“I love them for two reasons: No. 1, for their aesthetic styling, and No. 2, because I’m a radio broadcast engineer and they interest me electronically,” Rebell said. “I enjoy restoring them and working on them, and I don’t think the day will ever come when my collection stops growing. Sometimes I’ll buy three in a month and other times, nothing.

“But I’m always looking.”

As the demand for old radios continues to grow, so does the price. And, what goes up doesn’t necessarily come down.

In 1977, Bob Breed purchased a fully restored Philco Model 90 wood cathedral radio, manufactured in 1933, for $20 at a swap meet in Pasadena.

“Today, the going rate for that same model is between $450 and $600, and it’s bound to go up even higher,” Breed said. “Just in the last 10 or so years, these old wood radios have become almost impossible to find, and, when you do find one, it’s going to be very expensive.”

The same is true for the early plastic radios of the late 1930s and ‘40s. Colorful Art Deco Fada, Emerson, and Belmont table-tops made of marbled Catalin frequently fetch as much as $1,000, and even plain-looking brown Bakelite sets by Zenith, RCA and Belmont rarely sell for less than $100.

“In a window of maybe four or five years, the average cost of these early plastic radios went from virtually nothing to out of sight,” Breed said. “It’s unreal.”

“Prices have been pushed up by a sort of fad thing,” added a collector in Escondido who didn’t want his name used “because I’m in the phone book, and I’m afraid of being ripped off. As soon as these early plastic sets began showing up in antique books, everyone knew about them and everyone wanted them. They look good in your house, they remind people of the Atomic ‘50s, and they’re fairly easy to restore.”

Even more pricey than wood cathedrals and plastic table tops are the chrome-plated and mirrored-glass radios produced in limited quantities between the late 1930s and early ‘50s.

The most notable is the 1936 Sparton “Nocturne” Model 1186, encased in a circular shell of blue-mirrored glass 4 feet in diameter. The original selling price was $350. Today, collectors can expect to pay as much as $10,000.

“Most of the people who own these radios aren’t going to turn them loose for any amount of money,” Bob Breed said. “And when one does come on the market, you had better be prepared to pay the asking price. Otherwise, you can rest assured that someone else will come along who is.”

The age of radio officially began in 1895, when Italian physicist Guglielmo Marconi, the father of wireless telegraphy, developed a way to transmit and receive signals by Hertzian waves--defined, in technical jargon, as electromagnetic radiation resulting from the oscillations of electricity in a conductor.

In 1901, the American Marconi Wireless Telegraph Co. began handling messages transmitted in dot-dash code, and, before long, the wireless apparatus was being used by the armed forces of most countries for their signal services.

When the development of the vacuum tube a few years later made it possible to transmit voices and music, the wireless was no longer the sole domain of the military. Throughout the country, throughout the world, amateurs began to communicate with one another over crude, home-built crystal sets.

It wasn’t until the birth of commercial broadcasting--on Nov. 2, 1920, when Pittsburgh station KDKA signed on the air with news of President Warren G. Harding’s election--that “the radio receiver became a home appliance you could buy,” according to Time-Life Books’ The Encyclopedia of Collectibles.

The earliest manufactured sets could be listened to only with earphones, and tuning in a desired station often meant fiddling with as many as 27 dials and knobs.

Advances, however, came rapidly. The first radios with loudspeakers, powered by vacuum-tube amplifiers, were introduced in 1921. A few years later, improved circuitry had changed tuning into the simple one-dial operation it is today.

Typical of radios from the 1920s is the Atwater Kent “breadboard” series, so called because the components were set up on an open board. They featured a remote speaker and ran on batteries: a 6-volt car battery to light up the tubes, a 90-volt battery for the plate circuitry and an optional 4.5-volt battery for bias.

“There are very rigid lines drawn in the radio-collecting field, and people who collect only battery-operated radios from the 1920s wouldn’t give you a nickel for anything that came along later, even a Sparton Nocturne,” Bob Breed said. “I have a few battery sets myself, although I’m not really partial to them. But, let me tell you--the people who are, they’re die-hards.”

In 1927, a way was found to operate vacuum tubes from ordinary household current. Sales skyrocketed, and manufacturers like Philco, RCA and Zenith began encasing radio components--and speakers--in ornate wood cabinets.

Most radios from the early and middle 1930s were either large consoles or smaller dome-topped cathedrals, the latter particularly prized by collectors today.

In the years leading up to World War II, technological advances enabled radio receivers to expand from the standard AM, or “amplitude modulation,” band into the higher-frequency FM, or “frequency modulation,” band.

But since most commercial stations continued to broadcast only on AM, radio sets changed more on the outside than on the inside.

In his book, “Radios: The Golden Age,” author Philip Collins writes, “Plastic created a tremendous revolution in both design and mass production . . . . Table radios were among the first goods to be made of plastic. Chicago Molded Products built the first plastic cabinet in 1931 for Kadette . . . . And plastic compounds accounted for 95% of (all) table models by 1950.”

Most of these early plastic radios were constructed either of brown Bakelite or colorful, marbled Catalin. And, since plastic radios were a lot easier, and cheaper, to build than the older, hand-made wood sets, Collins writes, “Many of the 600 manufacturers flourishing in the United States . . . sought to put a ‘radio in every room.’

“They hired famous industrial designers to contribute to inherent obsolescence by introducing new models every year.”

As an early 1940s magazine ad for the Emerson Radio and Phonograph Corp. proudly proclaimed: “Raymond Loewy, America’s outstanding designer of everything from lipsticks to locomotives, from toothbrushes to military equipment, is now creating new styles and new features for Emerson Radio Electronics of the future, EXCLUSIVELY for Emerson in the radio industry.”

The result was a proliferation of stylish Art Deco radios, like the early 1940s Emerson Patriot and Fada Streamliner series, originals of which now fetch up to $1,000 from collectors.

Other designers created novelty sets emblazoned with reliefs of such popular radio stars of the time as Peter Pan, Charlie McCarthy, and the Lone Ranger, or iconoclastic radios in the shape of everything from clipper ships (Majestic’s 1946 Melody Cruiser) to globes (Colonial’s 1933 New World).

To most radio collectors, the Golden Age of Radio ended somewhere between the late 1950s and early ‘60s, with the development of solid-state circuitry. All of a sudden, sound mattered more than style, and radios began to look the same: brushed-aluminum boxes with flashing lights, touch-sensitive buttons and digital dials.

But, as far as Bob Breed is concerned, the era of aesthetic innovation lives on in the novelty transistors that continue to pop up on the market.

Over the last few years, he’s collected more than 200 of them, disguised as everything from antique cars and belly dancers to beer cans and Little Orphan Annie; from spark plugs and bottles of Hershey’s chocolate syrup to former President Jimmy Carter jumping out of a peanut shell.

“Quite frankly, old radios have become much too expensive for me to even consider buying any more of them,” Breed said. “That’s why I’m now concentrating on collecting contemporary novelty transistors. Some day, they’ll probably be as much in demand, and as valuable, as the older tube radios from the 1930s and ‘40s. But right now, they’re just starting to become popular, so they’re a lot more affordable.

“If nothing else, I guess I’m getting a head start.”