A Crummy Commercial

I've mentioned the Gilligan's Island radio (with the telescoping antenna) before: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2022/05/fallout-shelter.html Well I finally found an AM radio with a telescoping antenna in an old Esquire magazine, the Westinghouse 666P-5:   source: https://archive.org/details/Esquire-Magazine-1958-05/page/n71/mode/2up Let us take a look at the schematic of the Westinghouse courtesy of Beitman's 1959: https://archive.org/details/BeitmansMostNeededRadioDiagrams/1959/page/n159/mode/1up The 666P-5 has an ugly power supply (no transformer, shame on you Westinghouse !) - with the directly heated cathodes I bet it started to hum as soon as the filter caps began to dry out. But it does have a tuned RF amplifier so just that extra oomph for portable use, say on a vacation up-north ?  I'd classify this as a "3-gang" type of radio - most AM radios just had a two section variable cap, one section for the oscillator, the other to tune the input bandpass - ante...

 I saw this cover on Facebook: intriguing but not online and was intrigued.  I remember the government pamphlets on fallout shelters: https://archive.org/details/familyfalloutshe00unitrich/mode/2up I was a kid during this time.  And it always worried me a little: we never had a house with a basement !  That seemed to be a prerequisite for a bomb shelter (although I wasn't aware of the dig your own in the backyard type of shelter).  The other thing was that you had to stock the shelter with a bunch of stuff (like food, water and so on) but also a battery powered radio with a telescoping antenna !  All the portable radios we had were AM only with loopstick antennas !  In fact the only portable AM battery powered radio with a telescoping antenna I ever saw was the one from Gilligan's Island: source: https://gilligan.fandom.com/wiki/The_Radio But apparently the antenna (and handle) on top were added on by the prop person on the show, so nobody had such a ...