 |
Making Money
in Radio |
 |
|
|
This is one of thousands of
advertisements in various magazines that spanned more than
six decades. It is an ad for a National Radio
Institute
(NRI) correspondence course. Notice the date. In 1931 a
radio in your home was a luxury. A radio
connected our grandparents to the world. Television was
science fiction. The Internet was beyond science
fiction, never predicted, not even by Arthur C. Clarke.
|
|
|
|
When
the radio broke, the link to the outside world was lost.
Why? Because you only had ONE. As a matter of fact, in 1931
only 45% of households in the USA had a radio. It was a
major investment and it had to be repaired. Who was going to
repair it? YOU WERE! You were going to get BIG PAY in the
radio industry.
After World War II the price of a radio dropped to the point
where you could have "a radio in every room."
Bakelite table radios were relatively inexpensive, and by
1948 85%
of households owned a radio of some sort. More radios meant more
broken radios. You could make money in radio repair
and get "Big Pay" in some ambiguous "radio job" as
the ad stated.
Can you still do it today? |
|
|
|
|
1948 NRI advertisement.
According to their claims, you could make from $3,000 to
$7,500 a year in radio and have a nice car and house. An NRI
ad implied your wife wouldn't be happy unless you
took the course and made more money, like "Bill" did. Do you want your wife to leave
you for Bill? Better take the course!
Other ads showed you being bypassed for a promotion. In the 1960s,
an RCA course showed an Atlas missile being launched while
"you" sat at the controls but "you" were a silhouette, so
every person seeing it could put himself at the controls.
There were ads from the National Radio
Institute, Capitol Radio Engineering Institute, National
Schools, Sprayberry Academy Of Radio, Cleveland Institute Of
Radio Electronics, Coyne Electrical School and DeForest
Training, Inc. to name a few. They all promised to make you
a radio expert, and if you devoted your spare time to the
courses, you DID become one.
In 1987 I found the books from an NRI radio
course stacked up in the basement of a house we had just
bought. I decided to take the course and build the cool radio
that was part of the training. NRI no longer offered
the radio course, so I took
the computer course and built the cool computer that was
part of the training. (I didn't really care about the course, I
just wanted the computer.)
It worked, as
advertised! I've been working with computers ever since. I got a promotion, just like they
said I would! The placement test was on logic gates and I
had just finished the chapter on logic gates the week before
I took the test. We got a nice house and new cars and my wife didn't leave me for "Bill".
She left me for "Bob" but that's another story. |
 |
|
|
| |
|
|
|
There are still a few
guys out there who will repair your radio, and a whole bunch
of them who restore them for a hobby. One way to "make money
in radio" is to sell impossibly shiny ones on ebay,
like this one from "oldradiodaze125." People
will buy shiny radios even if they don't work. In this case,
the radio was restored to working condition. And it was
shiny. Who wouldn't want a shiny restored radio from 1940? |
|
|
|
|
|
|
The radio that was auctioned is a Philco model
PT-2, made in 1940 or 1941.
|
|
|
During the war all
commercial radio production ceased as the manufacturing
facilities of our country were devoted to the war effort. In
1946 Philco resumed production with the model 46-250 in the
same cabinet. They probably had tens of thousands of the
cabinets in storage during the war. They continued to use
this cabinet until 1949.
I wrote to "oldradiodaze125" and asked him how he
got it so shiny. He replied that he had sanded it with
"Micro-Mesh" sanding pads and there was no coating or
lacquer on it.
As you can see, it went for $281.90 with shipping. So can
anybody get in on this and "make money in radio?" Let's give
it a try. |
|
|
|
|
| I bought this on ebay for
$43.92 with shipping. These pictures are from the auction. It is not
a PT-2. It's a 46-250, made after the war. |
| |
|
|
The chassis was
filthy. Where WAS this?? Whose house is so dirty the inside
of their radio looks like this? Oh well, maybe it was in an
attic for 20 years. It had no power cord, the antenna was
detached from the case and I had to blow it out with a leaf
blower before it came into the house.
I decided NOT to restore it, just clean it up, add a new
power cord, make the cabinet shiny and resell it. None of
the tubes were tested. Andrea and I were very surprised when
we turned it on and it WORKED. It actually worked quite
well, except for a hum. |
|
| |
|
|
| After cleaning. |
|
|
|
|
The first step in cleaning
the cabinet was to soak the knobs overnight. I don't like
touching skanky radio knobs, especially when
I don't know what plague
infected, virus laden, sore covered degenerate
touched them last.* These pictures make me a bit
peckish for some miniature peanut butter cups!
(* No offense to the ebay
seller. Just a joke!)
|
|
|
|
|
| I spent $10.00 on the Micro Mesh
sanding pads and $8.00 on some decals for the front. The cost was now
up to $61.92. |
| |
|
|
|
|
Here it is, cleaned and polished. I
spent about six hours on it. Now it was time to ebay it. |
|
|
| |
|
|
Here are some of the pictures from
the ebay auction. I was very honest in the description and
stated that except for the power cord, the radio
chassis was UN-RESTORED and there was a hum due to the age
of the filter capacitor. (A strong station would drown out
the hum but I didn't mention that in the description.)
These photos don't seem to be as nice as the ones at the top
of the page, from "oldradiodaze125." I wasn't able to achieve that
look, and the radio was never that shiny even brand new, out
of the box. My pictures were a very close match to what the
actual radio looks like. |
|
|
|
|
On September 4,
2016 the radio sold
for $152.50 plus $18.00 shipping, or $170.50. So how much
did I make? I had $61.92 invested in the radio. I under
estimated the shipping by $10.00, so I had to eat that. Then
ebay took a cut of $17.97. Profit on the sale was $80.61. I
put about 8 hours into it, including driving to the UPS
store, so I made $10.00 an hour.
Keep in mind, this was a 46-250, not a pre-war PT-2. The
46-250 is so common that when we went to the Kutztown Radio
Show in September of 2016 we saw no less than eight of them
there. |
|
|
One thing that
surprised me was the note I got from the buyer, a guy who lives in California.
Dear Mr. Simpson,
The radio is arrived today with no damage. It work just
fine. Thanks so lot for your nice packing.
My parents used have such a unit back to late 1940s when I
was a kid.
This unit brought back lot of memories to me.
Thanks again.
Ron
|
|
| So how do you like that? A guy
bought it to LISTEN to it! He's almost as old as the radio!
I figured some hobbyist would want it to restore it. If I had known some 70 year old guy wanted the radio to
LISTEN to it, I would have replaced that filter capacitor so
the radio didn't have a hum. As a matter of fact, I would
have just given him the darn thing for free, to make the old guy
happy. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Now we come to a
twist in the story. On the day I posted the above on
facebook, an ebay user with a new account and no feedback
began to bid on the radio. The price began to shoot up. I
wasn't sure if somebody was "helping" me, so I went back on
facebook and told them to stop but they didn't.
We were all new on ebay at one time. Was this legitimate? Did
someone join ebay just to get this radio? Hey, it could have
been the old guy's son bidding against his father because he
wanted to give him a birthday present. Who knows?
The "make big money in radio" experiment now had an
unknown
variable. I
would have to start over. I needed another radio to shine
up, and this time, I wouldn't mention it on facebook.
Some time in 1988 my brother Chris
gave me a box of radios he found in the trash. At the time,
he was in college and driving a delivery truck For "Coventry
Market" on the side. He said he found the box on Rhawn
Street in the Fox Chase section of Philadelphia. It was time to open the box, grab a radio
and shine it up. |
|
|
|
|
| |
