Les Wylie has always dreamed in stereo. Whether it is reproducing vintage chess sets from scratch, tinkering with electronics in his shed, or fixing and reinventing antique radios, he always uses a “multidirectional perspective” to see beyond the basics.
During October, the Wood River Public Library is offering a special display of Wylie’s radios for visitors to peruse. The exhibit is a history of the sound transmitter that has shaped so much of our culture, from its beginnings using crystal detectors through the radios with which kids grew up in the 1960s and ‘70s.
At the age of 78 and recently celebrating his 57th anniversary, Wylie shows no sign of slowing down as he sits to talk about his hundreds of vintage radios, the culmination of years spent at Goodwill, yard sales, flea markets, and online excursions.
How did you get interested in collecting radios?
It never really “started;” it’s always been there.
I was born in 1940, and where I grew up, televisions didn’t really start showing up until the mid-1950s. So back then, radio was your form of entertainment. As a kid, we made crystal sets, and I had a ham radio license by the time I was 12 or 13 years old. It has just continued on from there.
So what is a crystal set?
It is really made up of just two sections — a detector section, where a crystal mineral will detect the signal, and a tuner section, which can be anything to a piece of wire that slides on the wire to a more advanced coil. Add some earphones, and that is all there was to it.
Shortly after that, we came up with the tube, replacing the crystal. This added an amplification stage. With the crystal set, you did not have volume control; you were limited by the power the station sent out and how close you were.
And your collection represents those eras and everything in between, correct?
Definitely. The first radios that came out were battery-powered because most people didn’t have electricity yet to plug them into. I have one radio that has a set of jumper cables, so you could use your car battery to listen to your radio if you didn’t have electricity in your home.
What is one among your most rare of radios?
I have a 1938 Beetle plastic. In my years of collecting, I have only seen one radio like it on eBay. It is a radio made out of plastic, but it was a liquid plastic that was molded. They would throw colored chips in while it was liquid and stir them in to give it its texture, so each and every radio was unique. The guy only made about 200 of them.
I got it on eBay. I saw the end of it sitting in a box, and I bid and got it for $7. I sure wouldn’t part with it for $7 now!
What is the state of radio collecting today?
I wouldn’t say it’s obscure, but it’s not really popular, either. A lot of people may have a radio or two in storage somewhere, but many of the people who remember radios are either not here anymore or too old to care. My main motivation in collecting them is for fun and to preserve the history; I don’t do this to make a profit. I am not even sure what many of them are worth.
There is just a fun to it. We would go out on the weekends and just see what’s around. If you caught a fish every time you went fishing, it wouldn’t be fun. It’s the thrill of the hunt.
As the kids grew up and moved away, what is that has kept you here in the Riverbend?
I worked in this area my whole life and only retired about 10 years ago. We have lived in the same location for more than 45 years. This is home.