None of that faux wood here - the handle and inset at the bottom are genuine wood, and not pine, either!
I don’t expect you to talk, Mr. Bond, I expect you to listen to the radio!
To Type, Shoot Straight, and Speak the Truth...
A man of the cloth and the steel he wields
To Type, Shoot Straight, and Speak the Truth... © 2015
Frontier Theme
That radio is a great find, even if it’s got “none of that faux wood.” ( :
After I’ve just read Richard’s Olivetti entry, I’m pretty sure it’s the 80, Lexikon 80.
That is a great radio and even better since it still works. The transistor radios I’ve found in the past year seldom do anything but make static and look good.
I love the first photo – not surprising given my love of spy movies and pretty much anything Cold War.
It is a tragedy that we have squandered radio. Why? It was democratic. For just a few Dollars (in the past sixty years) anyone could tune in to news, entertainment, music. Television came along and killed basic network radio. The web came along later and finished it off. I like outside the fourth largest city in the country and the radio is basically crap. Just try to find news! The neo-Nazis are controlling the AM airwaves and at least here, the Spanish speakers control the FM band. The web can’t be considered a successor to radio, it’s ‘way too expensive for that. Having vented, I do love your transistor! I have one of those GE leather-wrapped ones from the sixties, still works well during hurricanes! Richard K/Texas
I’m actually old enough to remember radio as a multi-band source of entertainment. Now the only station I can stand to listen to is NPR (which comes in nicely on this radio). I was surprised to find absolute silence on the Shortwave band, though – I expected not to get any Marine Band transmissions, living this far from any bodies of water, but shortwave ought to be teeming with weird, static-laden life. Does nobody use shortwave any more?
Great post. There’s a chance those Olivettis are British made.
The radio landscape is pretty desolate in Switzerland if you are an English-speaker. There is one station – for which we are all grateful, of course – but it re-broadcasts a mish-mash of programming from BBC, PRI (This American Life), and Canadian something-or-the-other; with a definite bias towards BBC. So I tune in occasionally to hear the snippets of local news, but I can’t stand it for long stretches. Nevertheless, we do have a nice radio at home that I shall write about now that you have started the meme (that’s my story and I’m sticking to it).
Man, all this talk of radios! Regarding “OHMSS”, it’s a near-perfect Bond film and perhaps one of the closest film storylines to the book. I say near-perfect because George Lazenby blows the last 45 seconds of the film (which I won’t give away here). There. I said it.
Ted, a superb photo at the top of this post. Very atmospheric, and if you wait for Sean Connery to turn up in “From Russia With Love” (Dir: Terence Young, 1963), you’ll see a radio similar to yours in a mis-en-scene that your photo reminds me of. I am both honoured and humbled to be mentioned in your blog, too, btw.
Dang, you got me wanting to go and write some more Bond stuff, but the hour is getting late and I have to go pick up my freshly-serviced Lettera 32 and Groma Kolibri tomorrow morning from my elusive repairman.
Actually, speaking of radios, my mother had one similar to yours. It was covered in a brown leather wrap with perforations where the speaker was. Sadly (and this has always ticked me off), it was stolen when she brought it into hospital when she had some routine operation back in the early ’80s. Stolen from a hospital!
Nice post, Ted.