Resurrection

The Old Man has a resurrection story for you today. No, not that resurrection, but one of a non-Divine old-timer that I had thought long since dead. Followers of my blog will recall several references to an old radio. Let's be more specific, here. We'll call him Philco 89, maybe Phil for short. He was born in 1933. When he was just a young thing, my dad gave him to my mother on the first Christmas they were married.

Phil provided many hours of entertainment to my folks. They heard the news of the world delivered by Lowell Thomas, Walter Winchell, and of course, Edward R. Murrow. They listened to "Make Believe Ballroom" from the Hotel Roosevelt and probably dreamed of someday traveling there. I don't know this for a fact, but it's a good bet they heard the news of Pearl Harbor from Phil.

Several years down the road, Phil was replaced by a newer radio. Time to upgrade, I suppose, and old Phil found his way down into the basement. He perched on a shelf near the washing machine. Mom would listen to what Phil had to say while doing her laundry and ironing chores. I recall (yeah, by this time I had made the scene) sitting with Dad and listening to The Shadow, Gunsmoke, or Inner Sanctum while he cranked the ice cream freezer. Phil didn't get to say much then. He spoke or sang only occasionally.

Flip many pages on the calendar. Phil rarely had anything to say now. Television had relegated him to obscurity. Dad was gone, I was all grown up, and Mom didn't spend a lot of time in the basement. One day during a visit, I asked Mom if I could take Phil back home with me. A spur of the moment bit of spontaneity, I guess.

Phil sat on an old trunk in our den for a while, seemingly content to be a curiosity for visitors. I woke him up once in a while, but never for very long. One day, Phil went silent. He could only make a guttural growling noise with a few pops and snaps thrown in for good measure.

We moved away from Virginia in 1991. Phil came with us, of course, but upon his arrival was exiled to the attic over my workshop where he remained until a couple of weeks ago.

Enter Bruce. Simply by happenstance, I discovered that Bruce was a collector/restorer of antique radios. Bruce loves radios. He eats, sleeps, and breathes radios. His collection is magnificent. Bruce came by his passion honestly. His father was an apparent genius when it came to electronics. He can regale you with stories of how his father taught him valuable lessons about the idiosyncrasies of what to my untrained eye, are simply containers of electronic spaghetti.

I took Phil over to Bruce's shop and he did an evaluation. Among other issues, it seems that some squirrels had been around nibbling and leaving bits of acorn behind. Phil's cabinet finish was pretty much gone, and there were a number of missing bits of veneer. Bruce operated and removed Phil's innards, and I brought his "skin" home to my shop.

I gave Phil a cosmetic makeover while Bruce performed the necessary surgery and stitching on his inner workings. I got a call from Bruce advising me that Phil was back, so I went over with Phil's newly buffed and polished "look" and Bruce remarried the parts.

What a thrill when we waited for the tubes to warm up to their trademark red glow, and once again after almost 25 years, Phil sang in that marvelous bass voice of his. I said to Bruce, "Wow! You've done wonders for the old radio." Bruce replied simply, "No, I rescued another one."

Late that night, I sat in the kitchen in semi-darkness, watching the tubes glow and running the dial up and down to see what I could find. I heard WCBS in New York, some station in St. Louis, and a ton of others from heaven only knows where. In that lateness, a part of me half expected to hear Edward R. Murrow say, "This is London". I know all of those old timers must be in there somewhere.