Everyone’s Radio Store

We all grew up with Radio Shack even here in Canada. Radio Shack has been in business since 1921, over 90 years. Radio Shack started in 1921 in Boston, Mass., by London-born Bostonian brothers Theodore and Milton Deutschmann. For most of those 90 years Radio Shack published some great catalogs. As a young boy and teenager living just across the river from Detroit, the best of both worlds existed. Lafayette Electronics had a huge store in Detroit’s downtown core. Windsor had a couple of Radio Shacks and both companies had some great catalogs.

From the website “Radio Shack Catalogs” -

But the growth of the Radio Shack chain was short-lived as management made a mistake: The stores began selling on credit and soon had a pile of uncollected receivables. And in the late 1960s, with the bank on their back, the company was practically bankrupt.

Enter Charles David Tandy. Tandy, owner of the leather goods company, Tandy Corporation, saw the potential of Radio Shack and the future of retail consumer electronics. In 1963, seeing an opportunity, he bought the company for $300,000.

And here’s the neat part of this story – a website about everything you’d ever want to know about Radio Shack, and copies of years of original  the Radio Shack catalogs. What's unique about this website is that the catalogs are presented as a VIRTUAL catalog, in a “page-flipping” format. This gives you the experience of paging-through an actual Radio Shack catalog.

This should bring back some memories of our early years as budding amateur radio operators.

Link:

http://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/