I'm like that myself; can't pass up any old radio or TV I see on the curb--I have to at least look at it. Years ago I collected old TVs I saw on treelawns in the neighborhood where I lived at the time. Today, I collect small radios (I have six antique/vintage Zeniths in my apartment now, not to mention many vintage transistor radios of various makes). I saw two vintage stereo consoles last summer in front of a house just a few doors down from my apartment; I looked at them, but that's all. I also saw, several years ago, an RCA 12" portable TV just up the street from here. I could have picked it up but didn't. Then there was the time, about two years ago (here we go again...) when I saw a 1978-vintage RCA color console TV, again just a short distance from my apartment.
Knowing I don't have the room for big TV or stereo consoles anymore is the only thing keeping me from trying to get these things home. If I still lived in a house with a basement, believe me, I would have tried (the basement of my former home was fully half full of old TVs, radios and a couple phonographs at one time).
As the title of my post says, you can't have just one antique/vintage radio or TV if you are the collector type. One leads to another, then another, then yet another... and so it goes. However, I look at it this way. Those of us who are "into" collecting vintage and/or antique electronics of any sort (as all of us are here at AK) are keeping these great old sets from being abandoned on curbs and treelawns, eventually to face a certain death in a landfill. Many of these old sets are restorable; it may take some doing, but it is possible to restore most old TVs and radios to past glory. Most people who own these old sets do not have the technical knowledge or background to keep these sets going, and, let's face it, some folks just put old sets out on the curb (or up for auction on ebay or Craigslist) simply because they don't have the room for them anymore, or because they just remodeled their living room or den and the set's cabinet doesn't match the new decor.
Sad. Very sad indeed. However, as I have said here before, every old TV or radio, etc. we AKers can restore to its former glory is one more set we have saved from the landfill. For sets made by now-defunct companies such as Zenith, this is very important, IMO, because they are a part of history and represent a level of engineering and sound/video quality we will never see again, in this age of just about everything being made by some no-name offshore company. This is why I am glad I became interested in Zenith entertainment equipment when I did, although when I brought home my first Zenith TV, a 23" console manufactured in 1963 (I got the set six years later from a curb just one street away from my home at the time), I had no idea I was going to like Zenith equipment as well as I do today. But I did and still do to this day; I feel it's just my small way of keeping the spirit of what once was the mighty Zenith Radio Corporation of Chicago alive, even if the company itself is long gone, never to return.
Who knows where the radios and TVs in our collections might have wound up were it not for collectors like ourselves?
