The story behind all the rare sets

[ChrisW6ATV]

Here is my "the ones that got away" story:

In 1979-80, I worked at Gemco Electronics in Chicago, until they went out of business. It was at the time a kind of hybrid store with discount household goods, new Sony and Panasonic equipment, and new and surplus electronic parts and supplies. It had started as General Materials Co. after World War II on south Michigan Avenue, Chicago's equivalent of New York's Radio Row (Cortlandt Street).

About this time, I started collecting old TV sets, and I decided only pre-1950 sets were old enough to be interesting and collectible. So, I got a Motorola VT-71, an Admiral 30A15, and a few others, even an RCA 630TS that was in the back of Gemco itself. What I did NOT get, even after I looked at one of their included manuals, were any of the GE 4TM-15 color monitors, new in their original wooden crates:

http://www.earlytelevision.org/ge_4tm15.html

Remember, I had decided to only collect pre-1950 sets, and these were "too new" and were color, therefore also "newer" than my idea of what early TV was. The one monitor on the sales area just sat there with a $75 price tag for the several months I worked there, until shortly before the store closed down and we were packing stuff up and closing out most of the surplus parts. Then, one day two or three guys came in and did a bunch of talking together and to my boss while I was busy doing other work, and they apparently paid for all of these monitors, how much I do not know, but they only wanted the CRTs. So, my boss had me help them open the three or four other crated monitors, and they removed the CRTs and left the cabinets and boxes for us to discard. It could have been Dan Gustafson maybe; he was a big collector in Chicago around that time, I later learned.