On rigors of working on a really old radio to give it life

Wayne Johnson
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Spring finally has sprung…somewhere. Trees are budding and flowers are blooming. The animals in Al Demeter Park next to the Santori Public Library of Aurora have come out of hibernation and are emerging from their dens just in time to get a load of wet, heavy, snow dumped on them.

I prefer to not officially take part in Spring activities until I believe it fully has arrived. To that end, I’m sticking to inside activities or semi-activities, which is why I decided to engage in a semi-activity in which I have absolutely no experience and about which I know absolutely nothing: Resurrecting an antique radio. I cruised through eBay and found an offering for a nice, well-worn, wooden cathedral-style (meaning only vast amounts of prayer, indulgences, and a blessing from the Pope can save it) cabinet model. The seller had a Buy It Now price of $40 but would take offers, so I offered $10. By the time I clicked over and checked my E-mail, the seller had accepted my $10 offer. Other antique radio aficionados foolishly had passed it by, so I was the only interested party.

When it arrived and I opened the box, I found the radio to be extremely well packed and protected, although it wouldn’t have looked much different on arrival if it had been unboxed and dragged behind the UPS truck from Washington state. I placed the electric artifact on my workbench and looked inside. All the vacuum tubes were gone. For you younger readers, vacuum tubes were these glass things with wires inside, resembling skinny light bulbs. They were plugged into the radio chassis and lit up when the radio was turned on, gradually reaching a temperature three degrees hotter than the surface of Mercury in July. But they were one of the components that made a radio work. I figured I’d find tubes somewhere, maybe at an anthropological dig site. The cabinet interior was filled with dust, grime, a worn out saddle shoe, seed husks, a pterodactyl fossil, and dead guppies. I almost expected to find a family of migrant weasels living behind the transformer. The fabric-covered power cord was somewhat frayed, probably chewed on by the weasels or possibly the pterodactyl.

Nevertheless, being fearless and foolhardy, I decided to plug it in to see what happened. When I turned it on, the small bulb up front that lit up the dial came to life. At least something was alive that previously hadn’t been a carnivore. Upon subsequent research, I learned you should never plug in an old radio and turn it on until you replace the capacitors, whatever they are, because you can burn out other valuable parts and set the dead guppies on fire and be in worse shape than you already were, if that’s humanly possible. At any rate, common sense fueled by the odor of barbecued railroad ties intervened and I unplugged it.

I think I’ll just work on the cabinet for now until I figure out what resistors, capacitance, inductance, condensers, adenoids, and hemorrhoids are and how they make the radio work. If nothing else, I can at least make it look as good on the outside as when it first appeared in the marketplace during the height of the Great Depression when no one could afford to buy it even though things were cheaper then. The stock market had crashed. Many were jobless, hungry, and barely could scrape up a nickel to go see a Shirley Temple movie or buy a Ford coupe. Corporate executives were jumping out of skyscraper windows after they saw a Shirley Temple movie. President Franklin D. Roosevelt revealed his New Deal, which nobody cared about because Prohibition earlier had been repealed and they were all drunk. Once the Nation sobered up, the New Deal put the country back on track and ended the Great Depression. But by then, most Americans who owned wooden radios already had boiled and eaten the cabinets for food.

I guess I should consider myself lucky to have found an old wooden radio, even in its current state of disrepair, without teeth marks. And I feel luckier with each can of Miller Lite I open.

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