“Nostalgia dies off. It really does.”
Maybe so, but Fielding Grigsby is doing his best to keep the nostalgia for old radios alive and well.
In his home on Bixby Street SW in Ardmore, Fielding Grigsby has a collection of old radios — of all makes, models and styles — on display in practically every room. And his 1,500-square-foot shop out back is filled with radios in various states of repair.
You see, Grigsby doesn’t just collect the old radios, he tinkers with them for hours on end until they’re back in working order. Then, if needed, he spruces up their exteriors. Some he sells, some he trades and some he keeps. But all of them hold a special place in his heart. And it all started way back when he was a young boy living in Bray.
“If there had been a word, I would have been called a nerd,” Grigsby said of himself as a young boy. “I went to Bray school and one of my neighbors gave me a radio because it cost too much to fix it. I’m a tinkerer. I found a ruptured part and went over to Mr. Rubbendahl’s instead of going to the movies, and he gave me a used part and I fixed it. And everyone thought that little odd boy was an Einstein. I’d rather work on a radio than go fishing.”
Grigsby turned that early interest into a career and now a hobby, following him through service to two American military branches, then later as an electronics teacher at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Miss.
After the military, “It seems like I always had a consumer electronic repair shop. I had three of them going at one time,” Grigsby said.
Grigsby is 67 and has retired several times. But, as is his habit, he is currently working, this time at Hayes Evaluation Logging and Perforating, an businesses he started with his brother-in-law. But the work doesn’t get much in the way of his radio obsession.
In his shop, Grigsby, and his dogs, spend up to four hours every night. One room is lined with metal shelves filled with everything from technical manuals to radio bodies, faces and parts.
There are also boxes of radio tubes and other parts. In another room is his workstation, where he figures out what’s wrong with the radio’s chassis and makes repairs.
“It’s nice to have a place to play,” he said.
In the house, he proudly takes visitors on a tour to see all of his most prized possessions. Five old radios sit above the kitchen cabinets. Another sits on a ledge above a coat closet in the living room and several others are “scattered” throughout the house.
“These are just pet ones that I decided to keep, and my wife tolerates them,” Grigsby said. “Everyone’s got their pets.”
Perched on the end of a couch in his living room, Grigsby showed off one of his most unique radios, a “chairside” Zenith model that sits at the end of the sofa like a side table. The chairside has the lighted dial and knobs on the top so a person can tune in the station while they sit comfortably next to it.
Across the room is a tall Zenith radio called a “console” style. Grigsby said that each year, radio companies made consoles that sat on the floor, square radios that are called “tombstone” style and arched radios called “cathedral” style.
Zenith is one of the most common radio brands. Grigsby said there may have been some others that were more expensive and worked better, but Zenith was widely known for its “big, huge, black dials.” Although he has plenty of Zenith models, he also has a wide assortment of Philco, Silverstone, Majestic, Kiel and Warwick radios.
“In here is a radio that I’m proud to say I’m the second owner of,” Grigsby said, leading visitors to a bedroom where a horizontal wood cabinet sits against one wall.
“They called it a ‘breadboard’ radio. It’s a model 10B 1924 radio and it works,” he said. “A friend of mine in Maine called and told me this radio was at an estate sale and I said, ‘I want it.’”
The radio’s cabinet features a drop-down front door, just like a bread box. Inside are three large numbered dials situated among large, silver vacuum tubes.
“You turned each dial and once you got it tuned in, you wrote the numbers down (that were) on each dial, so you made your own radio log,” Grigsby said. “And the next radio just like it wouldn’t work exactly the same at those numbers.”
Another glass-front curio cabinet holds several types of old and more current radios, including a collection of radios shaped like Model T cars. Room after room, Grigsby pointed out his various radios, some disguised as grandfather clocks and others as tables.
Grigsby said he finds his radios in the usual places, like estate sales, but he mostly attends “swap meets” in Mesquite and Grapevine, Texas, and in Tulsa and Midwest City in Oklahoma. There, he meets with other radio enthusiasts and sets about making deals.
“I have parts that I won’t sell to anybody, but I’ll trade them for parts I need,” he said.
He also gets plenty of buy-and-sell information from the Antique Radio Collectors monthly magazine that lists items for sale and items sought, along with photos of different radios and what price they brought at auction.
It’s all in the name of keeping a nostalgic part of history alive, which is just what Grigsby likes to do.
Another thing he would like to do is start up a local radio club, but he insists he doesn’t want anything formal.
“I’m not interested in taking minutes. I just want to get together once a month and talk about radios,” he said.
Anyone interested in starting a radio club is welcome to call Grigsby’s cell phone at (580) 222-9408.
