Chris Smith: Windsor man’s hobby is restoring old radios that once were functional furniture

Dave Lewis of Windsor wasn't around in the 1930s to plop down before a hefty, handsomely crafted Philco or Silvertone and tune in to "The Lone Ranger" or "Tarzan" or "Dick Tracy."

But at nearly 77 the restlessly industrious retired firefighter is old enough to remember when a radio was a radio.

From the 1920s until it was bettered by the television, a household's radio was its electronic entertainment and news source, its audible link to the world.

The family radio "took a place of honor" in a home, Lewis said in the tidy garage where he repairs and restores old radios. For generations, he notes, shopping for a radio was little different than searching for the perfect sofa or dining table.

"It was a piece of your furniture," Lewis said. "It was a piece of your home, so you wanted one that fit with your room decor."

The burgeoning popularity of televisions 60 and 70 years ago caused radios to be left off at night, and perhaps moved from a revered spot in the living room to the kitchen counter.

It was forecast that radios would in time be relegated to barns and sheds wherein the likes of buggies, gas lamps and butter churns gathered dust.

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THAT DIDN'T HAPPEN. Though diminished in stature by television, radio broadcasting survived TV and then every form of recorded music and podcasts and satellite radio. Nielsen Media Research reports that each week radio reaches 92% of American adults — 5% more than watch TV.

But today most of us listen to broadcasts in the car or tune in online or on a plastic, digital, throw-it-away-if-it-breaks radio.

Those aren't what turns Dave Lewis on.

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WHEN HE BEGAN to take notice of old radios at a flea market a year and a half ago, Lewis was in the market for a new pastime.

The retired Oakland Fire battalion chief had earlier built one of the sweetest, cleverest scale-railroad towns on Earth.

It was a 3D model of his life with his wife, Suzan, and their two daughters. HO-scale trains rolled past precise miniatures of each of the homes the family had lived in, and the historic Oakland firehouse where Dave and Suzan met, and on and on.

The train layout had occupied the dining table for long enough when Dave Lewis gave it away early last year.

Needing a new avocation, he took up with vintage tabletop radios that once were integral to American home life but now, if they exist at all, are likely to be forgotten and forlorn and inoperable for as long as their keepers can remember.

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"LOOK AT THAT. That's solid wood," Lewis said of a 1946 Gilfallan Bros of Los Angeles radio. "There are tables made less sturdy than that, and it's a radio!"

He's savoring the challenge of finding such radios, researching them, determining what parts they need and going in search of them. If he restores one and a relative or friend or friend of a friend admires it, he offers it as a gift from past.

Nineteen times so far, Lewis has reassembled and polished up an Emerson or GE or RCA Victor, Arvin, Crosley or Schaub-Lorenz. Then he plugs it in, turns it on. And waits.

When a voice or tune swells on, he channels the glee of a kid who discovered the wonders of the airwaves long before ever hearing or uttering "TV."

You can contact Chris Smith at 707 521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.

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