My auctioneer friend Rodney looked out over the sea of furniture and saw what I had already seen.
“There are a lot of good ones out there,” he said.
We were both admiring a collection of console and tabletop vintage radios – many in good condition and some needing a dust cloth with a shot of Pledge. Someone had collected not only radios, but also speakers (early radios didn’t have speakers inside them), along with a record player and the glass tubes that fired up the radios.
This was not the first set of consoles I’d seen at auction. A few years ago, I came across some chairside radios from the 1930s. Another time, an auction house was selling a collection of small personal models in a plethora of wonderful colors.
The craftsmanship of some of the radios at this auction was the thing that captured our attention. Inlaid-wooden fronts, knobby legs in the William and Mary style, brass sculptured dials, cathedral shapes. Almost all bore the names of their makers. Some were familiar to me and others were not – those companies likely shut down or swallowed up by ones that are still around. Philco, Zenith, RCA, GE, Crosley, Victor, Atwater Kent, Sparton, US Apex, Brunswick, Ferguson, Majestic.
The earliest radio was no more than tubes connected to a board, followed by wood and metal cases. By the 20th century, they were enclosed inside beautiful cabinets, masquerading as furniture, which one site noted sometimes cost more than the radio itself.
In the 1930s, radios with fancy cabinets were said to be found in the homes of the middle class. Tabletop cathedral-shaped radios were among the most popular. This decade is also considered the golden age of radio. Even those who didn’t have a beautiful cabinet to hide their radio had a small radio in the living room.
The most popular radios of the 1930s were made by Zenith, and its products are considered the most collectible today. The top of the line Zenith to collect now and to buy then – if you could afford it – was the Stratosphere, model 1000z. With an Art Deco design, it cost more than most cars at the time ime – $750.
Here is a sampling of radios, both console and tabletop, from the auction:
