REA's Boss 

Some of you who have visited this web have wondered who this "guy" is that is so wrapped up in old radio stuff and what he looks like so I thought I would "break" the camera and show you the old radio curmudgeon of REA. . . now if this doesn't frighten you off, nothing will!   Anyhow here I am and below is a picture of my assistant, who is the REAL boss of this operation.

Terry at the Parthenon in Athens (5/2000)

Any inquiries or paperwork must pass by me!
"Mr. Furby" - The real boss of REA

Some have asked how I got started with all this stuff and actually it is a pretty straight forward story.  It all started when I was a young and tender lad and got caught up with amateur radio through friends and boy scouts.  So for most of my years from 13 to about 56, I just was mainly interested in communications equipment and ham radio.  Then one day my wife took me to a flea market about 80 miles from Dallas and this old Silvertone radio kept calling out to me "help me, save me from the trash bin" AND it was very inexpensive, so I thought "why not"!  So I bought it, fixed it electrically and physically, then someone threw a $ 100 bill at me because they thought it was really neat so I sold it.  Then I went out and bought two more, then sold those and bought 4 more and so on and so forth.  Now there are hundreds of radios in the Radio Era Archives warehouse awaiting restoration or resuscitation or something to revive them after years of neglect and abuse.  Gosh, what fun this is . . . what a really neat hobby and gee, you can even sell them so you can rush right out and buy more!  Sound familiar??  

Then I got the absolutely brilliant (??) idea to try to archive all the neat stuff that had been written about the age of radio.  (this is similar to David beating Goliath off with the jawbone of an Ass (Jackass)) !!  I wondered if anyone was out there doing anything similar and found that almost all CD-'s that were being made with information on them contained current information, not old books, magazines and the like.  So having a business operation that was already doing electronic publishing of fossil catalogs for the world's major oil companies, I decided to see if the ARRL (Amateur Radio Relay League) ["Ham Radio" to those who have never read their QST magazine] was doing anything to preserve their magazines that had been published monthly since the end of 1915.  To my amazement, they were not doing anything so one thing led to another and I took on the task with their help in rounding up 80 years of magazines and indexing and I produced this series in 11 sets of CD's (about 35 CD's total), and to date have several hundred thousand of those CD's being used daily throughout the world primarily by ham radio operators or those who do research work with old radio things.  

This worked so well, I then started doing the Riders Perpetual Troubleshooters Manuals and now have some 100+ CD-ROM titles with old radio information, manuals, schematics, magazines, books, and you name it available.  

As to my task of archiving ALL the neat things written about the age of Radio - of course this is an impossible task but I am doing the best that I can with what time I have between running another business, restoring old radios, running a manual and schematic service for those who just can't live without the paper in front of them instead of a computer screen . . . but the bottom line is that I am having a lot of fun and that is what it is all about.!

So I hope I didn't put you to sleep with this old radio story, but there will be some who understand how you can get caught up with this hobby and its various aspects.  If you are enthralled with this story give me some feedback - if you want to vomit, tell me about it, at least I will know that you are "out there" in Internet land.  If you have a neat old radio story about yourself, please share it with me and if I think it is great and with your permission, I will put it on this web-site and create a readers column for archiving these stories.

Thanks for reading and visiting our web.

Terry Muncey - REA