Everyone who dabbles in electronics, and that’s just about everyone these days, has cause to visit a Radio Shack store at least a few times in their lives. I can’t imagine getting by without them. Radio Shack and I go back to a time when there was a tube tester in the corner of every store, and you could build your own stereo amplifier from a kit.
Naturally, when I saw a 1959 edition of Radio Shack’s mail-order catalog on eBay, I had to buy it. What I found was the Radio Shack we know and love, only more so. Click on any image for a larger view.
According to Wikipedia, Radio Shack was founded in 1921 by brothers Theodore and Milton Deutschmann of Boston. The pair opened a store downtown that catered to the growing interest in amateur–or “ham”–radio.
They called the store Radio Shack after a term used by sailors to describe the small wooden shack that houses a ship’s radio officer. The company sent out its first catalog in 1939.
By 1954 Radio Shack launched its house brand, named “Realist,” which was later changed to “Realistic” due to legal squabbles. These products looked okay but were generally pretty lousy performers. No self-respecting audiophile in my day would be caught dead with a Realistic component system.
For me, the heart of Radio Shack has always been its many parts: an endless array of plugs, adapters, cords, cables, fittings, and whatever you need to hook one thing to another. And batteries of every sort.
But at one time the company was much more diverse, stocking electric frying pans and hair-cutting kits along with the cameras, clocks, and toys. Although the product range in 1959 was broader, a lot of them seem like gimmicks.
Due to a risky scheme to give customers easy credit, Radio Shack was nearly kaput by 1960. But along came leather-goods purveyor Charles Tandy, who knew a good gimmick when he saw it, and he bought the company for $300,000. He named the new outfit Tandy Radio Shack & Leather. And even though the leather-goods side of the business was eventually sold off, you can still occasionally find a combined Tandy Leather/Radio Shack store in small towns.
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This article was last modified on May 17, 2023
This article was first published on December 17, 2010
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