My dad's tube radio turned into guitar amp

[Kevin in California]

Yep, 62 here. When I get married in 72 our first TV was a hand me down from the early 60's and it was all tubes.

[Dave Bagwill]

68 here, married in 19 and 71. Changed tv stations remotely, from the sofa, using a 6' Shakespeare fishing rod.
Got the modern tv set eventually; I unpacked it and set it up and was throwing the packaging out when a small package fell to the ground. I was not expecting this - it was a remote control! It came with the tv!!

[Will Reyer]

ah, Herman, that was cool! Took about 2 minutes here in the bucolic backwaters of the Frozen North Rust Belt (maybe 20 miles north of Ken Cierp's place) to download your audio n video but definitely worth the wait. What a great way to repurpose your dad's radio!

I'm 73 and I remember tube radios well. My grandfather had one in the parlor, a cabinet floor model from the late '20's with just one little lighted dial and two knobs up toward the top of all that lacquered woodwork, making your father's from 1957 look futuristic. My grandmother would let my cousins and me in there on Sunday nights after supper to hear the Lone Ranger from WJR in Detroit on the radio.

My late father was a radio nut, it was high-tech when he was a kid - he had an FM radio in the living room when about the only stations you could get were the university stations in Ann Arbor and East Lansing. He bought me a little breadboard short-wave radio kit and taught me how to solder. I promptly put it together and to work. It didn't have a case, just a front. To change bands you didn't turn a dial but pull out one coil and plug in another. Wired the antenna to a screw on the metal casement window in my bedroom for an antenna.

While my parents were listening to FM long-hair symphonic music in the living room I was on the AM band in my room listening to the big 50,000 watt radio stations from Cincinnati, Chicago and Nashville after the little local 5,000 watt AM stations had to leave the air at sundown. WJJD,WSM, WCKY, WLS - Randy's Record Shop in Gallatin, TN selling 5 record packages - on MWF they'd sell Screamin' Jay Hawkins or Bobby Blue Bland and on TuTh Sat they'd sell Hank Williams, Hank Thompson, Hank Snow, etc.

The local main street appliance store sold the latest 45 rpm records and had a tube-testing machine so you could bring in the suspected failing tube and see if it was bad. The neighbors had a TV so I'd go over there at 5 pm to see 15 minutes of Tom Corbett, Space Cadet before we finally got a television.

And then in 1955, for all practical purposes, Charles Edward Anderson Berry started rock n roll with his song, Maybellene....

Thanks, Herman, for the nostalgia trip and good work with the radio amp!

[John Parchem]

Does anyone remember from the 50s and 60s that you could make a non power AM radio out of a quaker oats box (coiled with very thin varnished wire) a crystal (formed a diode to rectify the AM ) and a ceramic ear piece. You would tune dragging a nail with a wire across the coil on the oats box. It was the project that got me interested in electronic and I have also had a lifelong love of oatmeal, only from quaker oats. The device was powered by the radio waves crossing the coils. I would only get the very local 50000 watt stations. Did not need any tubes.

[Dave Bagwill]

+1 on the oatmeal!
I gave my parents grief one Christmas for getting me a 3 transistor radio rather than a 6. Ungrateful little wretch......