company and my grandfather started this 1944 and originally him and his brothers started full of PEP
appliance him and two of his brothers when radio came out big my grandfather split off started stands
for radio 1944 like I say that was on Prospect Hill over on Roger Street and they
had a duplex. The business was in one side and they lived in the other side. And he bought this property
here in 1953. Built the building you see now and been here ever since. Still in the family. I have a
picture here if you're interested in looking at it. This here is my grandfather. This was his two brothers.
And that's a newspaper clipping from back in the 30s. So they've been entrepreneurs in this area for
quite a few years. And the business has changed a lot through the years. Of course, radio's not the
repair business it was. We graduated into the TV repair and covered most of southern Indiana.
delivering parts to TV repair shops everywhere. And that basically carried us through the 50s, 60s,
70s, 80s, and even into the 90s. And as we know, not very many people fix TVs anymore. So that business
has gone away. We graduated into the industrial business.
doing business with Indiana University, several different industrial places around here, and the medical
industry. The medical industry's been huge in our success here through the years and still continues
on. Do you still get many like radio and TV hobbyists coming in? We do. We get quite a few hobbyists
coming in. Not what it once was, but
Still, we've got some amateur radio operators that show up, and just your general hobbyists. It's great.
Yeah, I played in here when I was a kid. I started working here 54 years ago when I was 13 years old.
My grandfather would find things for me to do. I'd mow the lawn, paint the building, put up stock, anything
he could find to keep me busy and keep me involved.
That was great. That was great. A lot of great memories. That's why I'm still here. That's why we're
still going. My mother worked here. It was her dad that started the business. She passed away four years
ago, but she was involved in the business through all those years. We worked together. My wife is a
bookkeeper in there in the office. She takes care
She takes care of the money. I take care of spending it. I've got a pretty good selection of old radios
up here that a lot of people have come in and admired through the years and starting from the clock
there, which everybody likes my clock up there. That one's a 1923 and then
1928, 1937, a lot of different ones that are pretty neat pieces. Like you say, a lot of things have
changed through the years. That shelf right there and the back shelf back there used to be all receiving
tubes to fix your TVs with. As you see, none of that exists anymore. You can take a look around. We
got a lot of different parts. We got a lot of different
cables, connectors, lamps, relays, fuses, capacitors, resistors, just you name it. I think at last count,
we had 28,000 part numbers. And that's a lot. That's a lot, yep. We do sell wire by the foot.
You got it all spooled up and I know it looks a mess back here but a lot of people don't need a thousand
feet of cable or whatever you need as we'll try to supply it for you. There used to be stereo equipment
all around the room in here and you could control everything from this old panel right here. If you
wanted to hear an amplifier, you'd push the button. If you wanted to hear an accessory to that amplifier,
This button, any set of speakers, you could do the whole thing. Just stand right here and turn everything
on in the room. It's pretty neat. My grandfather's design here. I got this stereo right here that we
still listen to every day. That was my graduation present from high school in 1970s. Wow. Great.
A lot of old stuff in here, including me. The crystal radio was the first circuitry thing I ever messed
with. And it's like this bunch of little wires and stuff and a crystal. You can pull in radio signals.
It's pretty cool. That's a pretty good start in electronics for most young kids. Well, I would like
to say thank you for the community.
community of Bloomington and others around the surrounding area that's kept our business thriving through
the years. So we appreciate each and every one of our customers and always good to see you come in.
Thank you. Hi, my name is Dave Lindley with the National Free Flight Society. We're here today at the
beautiful West Bodden Resort
Flying a sport we call indoor free flight. It's a pretty simple concept, a rubber band powered airplane.
Some are very large, some are very small, but they're all very light. The heaviest airplane you'll see
fly today weighs 3.1 grams, which is the weight of a US penny. The bigger ones you see are actually
lighter. They are the international class.
and they weigh about 1.4 grams. And in this room today, we have the current world champion, Brett Sanborn,
and we have four previous world champions in this room flying today.
So we actually fly all over the world at big, voluminous buildings like this. The West Baden Resort
is very nice for us because there's so much area in the round. But we fly in old blimp hangers around
the country.
In December, we took the US team to the World Championships in a salt mine in Romania. So 800
feet underground, but the cavern height is 185 feet. So if you have a large open room, we will be there
flying. Great. You guys could use a new hobby.
like cut up in the shirt like oh it's gonna hit me in the face