Good Night at the Auction

[bgadow]

There was an avid collector in my town who was in the process of opening a radio museum; his health failed & he passed away before his dream could be fulfilled. His family has been slowly disposing of the collection. There was an auction yesterday featuring part of what remains; anxiously I awaited. What would be there? How deep would the pockets be?

There were, I'd say, maybe a dozen serious collectors there. They started in on tables of radios. The first thing I had my eye on was a Hotpoint TV, one of those tiny late 50s models. Actually, I guess I had never seen one in person because I pictured them as being much larger. I just knew it would go out of sight. Nope. I bought it along with 5 or 6 radios for $2. I ended up buying several large lots of radios for $2 or not much more; paid $2 each for a transistor Transoceanic (1000-D), a Bendix radio built into a table (one of those with a dissappearing woodgrain dial) and a box of 78 records. Got a big Pilot table radio with several bands for about $10 and a neat Dahlberg coin operated radio for about the same price. Just for the heck of it I bought an '88 Zenith 13" color tv (Mexican built) for another $2.

This all made for a good night. What happened next made for a great night.
There was a table full of radios and stuff and they decided to sell it for choice. I had my eye on something in the back. Now, some of these collectors had not been bidding on anything. I guessed they must have been waiting around for the same thing I was. The bidding started. I bid up to $10. The bidding stalled. I took my choice: 2 Pilot 3" TV sets, one missing the crt. Here, I thought I would never own one of these because they always sell in the hundreds-and for $20 I own a pair.

As I sort of expected the picture tubes in both the Pilot & Hotpoint are bad. I know they are both notorious for that. It looks like someone broke the crt on the Hotpoint. I do have a 3KP1 in a scope so I can at least get it running with that. I could have sworn that one of the 3" scopes I had was white phosphor; it must have been the other one, a DuMont, that I gave away at the ETF convention a year ago.

Anyway, a good night...I will post some pictures when I get time.