 Hi, I'm Mark Zimmer. I'm here today at the Sheboygan County Historical Museum with my display of antique radios, and we're going to give you kind of an overview of the history of radio and some examples of What is in my collection? I've always been fascinated with radio When I was 10 years old my uncle gave me my first antique radio and that kind of set the bug in me which really took off after I finished school I found my first antique radio and from then I never looked back, so I've been a collector now for oh at least 45 years, I guess and I do have a private collection That's quite extensive and represents the whole history and technology of the radio industry radio really first got its start in the early teens and during World War one is when the technology really took off and developed and a lot of the major players during that time were involved in wartime technology production for the United States government and Was used in World War one in the trenches and of course back then in its infancy radio was mainly used for communication during the trench warfare time of the war and One gentleman named Edwin Armstrong was instrumental in creating the radio circuitry and Necessary technologies to provide that radio service to the troops and of course after the war was over It was recognized that radio was an up-and-coming technology that could be used for broadcast of entertainment news to the public and so at first all it was available was kits and plans and Individual had to build their own radio because there were none available in the store And if we come over here, we'll see an example of a homemade radio set from the early 20s This is a homemade set that was made in about 1921 and it features over here is a crystal Tuner and that's where the antenna Was hooked into and the radio waves were picked up by moving this little lever around There's a little poker on the end of this lever and it hits a galena crystal and once that circuit is complete It would transmit the radio waves into this contraption here, which is a Both a tuner which has got a slide on it here that allowed you to go up and down the radio dial You might say and this is an inductance System for changing the capacitance of the condenser, which is this it's a technical thing But that's how people listen to radio back then it required no power other than plugging it into a very long antenna wire And then of course in the very early days of radio A company was formed by a gentleman named David Sarnoff who was an immigrant from Russia and David Created a company you may have heard of called radio corporation of America or RCA and RCA was simply a paper company, but David was smart and he contracted both General Electric and Westinghouse to design and produce the first some of the first radios to the public For their use in receiving entertainment news and this is an example right here of one of the first radios made by the radio corporation of America RCA and It's also a Crystal set as well It uses no tubes. It works pretty much like that radio. I just described to you This is a tuner and go up and down the radio dial And this is your your detector as it's called There'd be a little galena in there And then this would make contact with that again complete the radio circuit and these various Little screws here is where you hooked your radio antenna your ground your headphones You could only listen to this with a headphone and of course This is another example of an early radio crystal set with the crystal on top. You can see the little gizmo Picking around on the galena crystal and this is your tuner here Then it went from crystal sets to early tuned radio frequency type radios and we have some in different examples This is a one tube radio right here. There's the tube and You have your your little tuner up here in the front that you adjust and this is your Inductance for your Receiving your radio waves. So it's a very basic set was very affordable back in the day You know it was kind of like the every man Radio not unlike the Model T Ford and of course you use headphones to listen to this radio too Technology continued to evolve It this is one of the first portable radios that you could take to the beach and this one was made 1924 it's a crossley radio and it's it's in a leather case. So it all folded up and Of course you can see here inside the technology is pretty simple There's not much to it These little spider web things here is how you adjusted your inductance again to Get the maximum output of your radio signal. And of course it did have a dial for tuning the frequency WHBL Any anything 6 20 a.m. Milwaukee. That's how you did it with that and these are different tap settings for setting your different Inductances and of course you have your volume control over here and these are all your different hookups for your Batteries that used different types of batteries to make it work So you were not only lugging the radio to the beach, but you needed a loudspeaker Which is what this is. This is an early Magnavox radio speaker So you'd hook that all together and then you had to lug along your your batteries too and those batteries weren't your little A&B C&D type bright battery cells. They were big Long cylinders and boxes of of batteries So it was kind of a pain, but that was technology at its finest back in 1924 Here's another fine example of a 1923 radio for in the home. It has a built-in loop antenna on it You know a lot of times people had to go outside and string up a wire From the house over to a tree or something This one had a built-in radio and it was made by a company called de Forest, which was part of Lee de Forest's operation and Then has little portholes in here so you can see the tubes and when you're operating it And they you'd see the glow of the tubes through those portholes and It has a place down underneath to store various See if I can get that open you could store various things in here like extra radio tubes and certain types of technical Inductance frequency Acceptors etc etc so And it all closed up, you know They tried to make things look like a fine piece of furniture back in those days Because this was the latest thing, you know It's like the new flat-screen TVs of the day only this is 1923 but that was a proud piece in the family's home so Because of that a lot of companies took advantage of that and they tried to make it into art And that's what this is. This is a an old 1927 super eight neutral wound It's called and as you can see it's got a very unique design to it and tuning it required tuning all three of these dials to make Make it accept a radio frequency. So if you were trying to listen to WHBL or something else you'd tune this one here and this one to there and this one to here and then you'd monkey with your volume control and your Inductance settings and things of that nature and after a little fiddling you'd be able to pick up WHBL And they had a lot of power, but it was a lot of messing around Again, here's a Atwater Kent, which was a very popular radio in its day as well and Atwater Kent was kind of considered the Cadillac right radio manufacturers back in the 20s and They started out with again radio that operates off of batteries and and a loud speaker and Inside it's it's pretty simple. You can see the tubes in there. It was a five tube radio and had The three tuning capacitors on it that all three had to be tuned in to a certain degree in order to achieve radio sound Radio continued to develop in the 20s at a very fast pace and By 1928 they actually were making the first electric Radios for the consumer to buy ones. It didn't require Lugging all the batteries just simply plug them into the wall and plugged in your antenna so this is an example of the first electric radio manufactured by Atwater Kent in 1928 and It does play as you can see it has All tubes in here one two three four five six seven tubes and Each tube had a specific Duty in the operation of the radio the big one in the back operated regulated the power for the different tubes This tube here is what they called the Detector tube and it operated very similar to those crystal radio sets. I was showing earlier Where you had to poke the Galena to get the signal? That's a that was your signal receiver and then you have tubes in here that Amplify the sound audio amplifier tubes and the other tubes that work in the Radio circuitry. So this was a self-contained radio. The first electric has a rather unique speaker too, which was part of the whole operation and of course we've got some vintage 1928 music being transmitted into the receiver right now and It radio continued to develop and by the late 30s most of the technology and Circuits design had gotten to the peak level of what am could do in the marketplace And we have an example over here of a couple of radios This is a detritola from 1937 By the time this radio was made in a short ten-year segment radio was already coming up to the Peak or the zenith of its ability to receive Signals and you could not only get am signals like whbl But it also had short wave bands on it So you could listen to the police band and you could listen to the very a short wave bands and you could hear London and Germany and China all in this set and By the late 30s and early 40s Edwin Armstrong the gentleman who was instrumental in some of the first radio technology had invented FM broadcasting or frequency modulation Broadcasting and we all know that FM is a far superior to am and as far as static and noise goes and FM began its course and pretty much phasing out what we today know that am is a thing of the past and FM is where things are before Streaming came into existence. So it's a long story. It's it's interesting history It's fascinating technology, and I'm glad that I'm able to share it with you today My name is Sandy Colby, and I am a collector of snow people we are looking at various cross stitch and Other hand-stitched snow people on the big red board and now we're going to walk over To some of this stuff that I've done. We have a quilt on the bottom and most of the rest of these are Crocheted we also have some embroideries That were done on some automatic machines We also have a few ties That are just thrown into the rest, but most of the rest of these have been crocheted or quilted Everything on the Christmas tree has been cross-stitched They are all patterns that I have and then we have this batch over here, which are mostly crocheted However, we do have a few things that are bought Well, I'm Chuck born and I'm a local she plug-and-falls farmer and This started I think when I was ten years old I opened the farm journal magazine and Saw that John Deere was getting Done with the two cylinders and going to four cylinders tractors It was called the new generation tractors, and I when I was ten years old. I said that's my tractor I like I love them. I love the body styles on them and I Still farm with 30 20 and 240 tens so I Started collecting these oh Back in the 90s. I guess most of these are from implement dealers This is a That's a 3010. That's one of the first ones they came out with in the 40 tens and I also collect line L trains at home and these are some Trains that came out with the new generation John Deere's on them and These are all this size and then They're starting to come out with What are these one 32nd? Tractors now and I kind of like to collect them because they're a little smaller. They don't take the shelf space, but And the interesting thing is on somewhere in the 60s John Deere decided to They were making garden tractors, and they thought they could sell more by painting them different colors and It didn't go over too big and They ended up painting a lot of these green and selling them and if you can find them. They're pretty rare but You know the we go into some of the bigger ones of the 60 30 Was the most highest horsepower John Deere or a tractor made it. It's time to wheel drive and they made these oh up through 76 I believe the 60 30s so I never had too much use for the two-cylinder John Deere's but these were Mechanically simple There's no electronics whatsoever. You can start them without The battery even connected if you run them down a hill they'll start up and you can work all day with them, so Yep, so this book here tells the the whole story of How they were developing the four cylinders while still trying to make a living selling the two cylinders because If the farmers knew that they were coming out with these they wouldn't buy a two-cylinder, so oh My name is Randy stocky. I Take care of bonsai I sort of say it that way because It's almost like having children that you have to care for There's some of these that Literally you can see that they're they're rescued where some people buy something a bonsai and They don't know what they're getting themselves into and I ended up with several of these simply because They don't know what they have and they don't know how to take care of them And when they're just about dead because they know I take care of plants I had my own plant business for a few years Way back and so I started saving them collecting them from other people bringing them back to life and It's always just become a habit hobby for me. I've done it almost all my life. I've always liked plants The plants on this side of the table are all Ones that would be in the house and the ones on this side of the table all would be ones that Would be in the greenhouse at this time of the year There's this one here and it's one of the oldest ones Tamarack it it's probably the oldest one on this table right now and it grows so slowly because It only has half a season it only grows half a year and then it goes dormant So right now it is in the dormant stage and it'll just be starting to butt out You can see where the little buds are all starting to come out now So this tamarack would probably be at least 15 feet tall in the wild had it had it been growing so There's a few of these you can take just about any kind of plant or shrub in that in nature You can take a flowering shrub and do it with So and you I've been doing this just now where you train The branches to go a certain direction So you can bend them One thing about bonsai the theory of it is is that you don't necessarily Have branches overlapping themselves any more than necessary each branches like its own arm its own entity So you try and train it that way so that every arm has a different or its own direction So and that's what I've been doing and a lot of bonsai is basically just trimming So some of these you trim So much per year You you train it so much per year You might leave the wires on for a year or two and then after that the branch will stay there normally naturally So it's training and that's what bonsai is all about. I grow my own Moss right in my own greenhouse so that I always have something to Keep it moist That's the thing with bonsais. They always need to keep moist be no wait moist That's why I say they're just like children you you need to take care of them almost every day If I go on vacation I I worry about the people I leave behind just to you know, take care of them while I'm gone So it's it's my love Morning, my name is David Weinholt I grew up in Sherman Center on a dairy farm between Adele and Random Lake and When I moved to Sheboygan Falls to start my career I started hearing about the Sheboygan Falls creamery and I also found out that my uncle used to work for the creamery as well when he was after high school, so I started collecting bottles probably in the 1980s and Just found him at antique shows bottle shows Thrift stores and estate sales So my collection includes primarily Sheboygan Falls creamery items you particularly can see some of their cook cheese cottage cheese containers the large bottles at the end of the display here and I'm particularly kind of Fond of finding those things in my uncle's collection, which are in the center of the table some of the premium items that they might have given away during the holiday season and then in addition to the Sheboygan Falls creamery I decided to limit my collection to Sheboygan County dairies So you'll see here on this side of the table some examples of Sheboygan dairies a few the Schlickding bottles which are very colorful that are in the back of the table and then Representative bottles from some of the other Sheboygan dairies in the in the city and just today one of the other collectors had a few bottle caps that he provided and So I've added to my collection just standing here at the collection today With a few other bottle caps from some of the Sheboygan dairies That he told me about so I Did a little research on the creamery as well at the Sheboygan County Historical Research Center in Sheboygan Falls And they provided some additional information and some pictures of the creamery when it was in action in Sheboygan Falls They got sold to Lake to Lake eventually and But went out of business sometime in the late 1950s My name is Matthew Cider and I collect bobbleheads I've probably been collecting bobbleheads for maybe between eight and ten years now. I've always loved sports Doing sports in the backyard with my brother soccer baseball basketball football just anything and watching sports on TV and Collecting things like sports cards or bobbleheads were just ways that you feel closer to the game So going out to a brewer game My mom would always try and pick games where there would be a bobblehead giveaway and that was kind of the beginning of my collection was Going to Brewer games and getting some of the giveaways As I got older, I really loved going to thrift stores. I also collect sports cards vinyl records and bobbleheads and Once I started being able to drive myself to Goodwill That's when my collection really started to take off finding different bobbleheads at Goodwill's and St. Vincent DePaul or garage sales and adding them to my collection Some of the favorites that I have here. I really love the the vintage ones for the Brewers also really like the Racing sausages. Those are some of my favorites. I'm more of a collector of opportunity If you will buy going to Goodwill's It's not something that I normally just seek out buying bobbleheads going on eBay, but When I come across them at a good price, I'll snap them up and out to my collection if I don't already have them And I think that's how you avoid Collecting junk and actually having a collection is when you're content with what you have but also always wanting to improve and I think you'll probably Find that a lot of the collectors here will tell you the same thing another favorite of mine some of the Packer ones are From my grandfather on my mom's side. He had a bathroom in his house That was just full floor-to-ceiling of Packer's memorabilia And so he would have these bobbleheads in there And I remember playing with these when I was really little the car in the airplane bobbleheads and so When he passed away he left a lot of these different memorabilia Bobbleheads things like that to my brother and myself. So those are definitely some of the favorites of my collection I'm Mike Hanlon. I am here as part of the collectors and collections with my collection of Records and ephemera from the record label of Ghost Box Records, which is a record label out of the United Kingdom The term that most often gets connected to Ghost Box is hauntology I think a way to think about that in a meta way is sort of a nostalgia for nostalgia Meaning that if you think about things from your childhood You can usually if there's things that you're trying to remember you can usually go onto YouTube and see things or listen To things or you can go to eBay and you can buy things There's a lot of things that if you want to remember those parts of your past you can really just go and experience them again But that's not always the way things were there was a time where if you're trying to remember those Oftentimes your memory was fuzzy. It was inaccurate misremembered or sometimes just completely fabricated and Ghost Box as a record label is sort of Built a world around those sort of misremembered memories All of the design work is created by one guy one man named Julian house Used to design record covers for other artists as well and he does all the work for Ghost Box and It's because of his age and his geography The record label has a very sort of 60s and 70s British sensibility to it, which isn't necessarily my background in my experience, but I do have a fondness for this sort of a style I Feel like there's a spookiness to it that is what first attracted me to it So some of the things that I've got you can see I've got all of the records that they've released on vinyl But I've tried to collect some other things as well. So there are posters from concerts that they've put on magazines with interviews I actually have a few pieces from other exhibitions other museums that have done some Showings of Ghost Box work. So this is a book that was from a Exhibition that happened in the United Kingdom There's also a couple pieces here that are from an exhibition that happened in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania That was in 2016 and I was really excited about it I first saw that that was happening online and realized. Oh, this is actually happening in the United States So I spent the weekend and drove out to Pittsburgh on my own just so I could go see the things that were there Also a lot of prints That they created for promotional purposes for some of the things that they were putting out The text over here is from that Pittsburgh exhibition I think that kind of covers the majority of what I've got here in a nutshell I've also got some of the music that is playing I'll be playing records all day from Ghost Box records And I don't know how well it would show up on camera But the projections that I have in the back are from that Pittsburgh exhibition I had asked the Wood Street gallery if it would be all right for me to take some pictures They said yes, so I went ahead and I happened to have an iPad and I thought I'm never gonna see these projections again I just want to capture some of that so I cut that together in about a seven minute video before the Collectors and Collections event I'm Jeff Michaels and my brother Jerry is a collection from my dad's orchestra It started in 1937 and it was until 1967 and Here's some pictures as a picture of my dad with a saxophone and his orchestra Here's a poster from Random Lake. He played for the boat races out there and here's some Interesting stuff I have here pictures and They played at the Pioneer when they opened up that time for the grand opening and they played At Fox Hills when they had their opening and At the River or I should excuse me a pap theater and they played a lot of different places I didn't know all of them and Here's kind of the history of the band Here's some of the places that they played at you can see This is the original picture of the band from 1937 here I can get it up here here are the The all the guys that played in the band and here's kind of his business cards Stationery this is my brother Jerry. I'd like you okay. You tell me when you're ready for okay I want you to meet Don He's one of the guys that are left he and Bob Holler are two guys that I know are left from the band Hi John Madden formerly of Sheboygan and if you look over here through the far side You'll see my stuff from high school South High 68 There was one of the few guys that had a letter sweater That was pretty popular back in the 40s in the 50s, but mine's obviously the 60s I started collecting Sheboygan stuff Approximately 30 years ago besides my high school stuff and after college my wife and I moved to New Mexico and I was a band director for 33 and a half years Music is what made me a life Made my living walked out of college in those days with no deaths because I was playing in a rock-and-roll band We played at Geno's four nights a week the West Georgian tea company and a couple other groups So I always had a little coin in my pocket and speaking of coins down here on the table I collect Sheboygan bar tokens and For those of you who are not familiar with that when you walked at a bar in the old days You'd get a short beer. Let's say it was a quarter You throw down a dollar and you wouldn't get 75 cents in change Which you would get 75 cents in Good for type tokens from all these bars and a lot of these bars are gone But I've got over a thousand eleven hundred different bar tokens from all all different places And then up here this book is tokens from HC Prang for one five ten twenty five cents different stores bus tokens Good luck And over here are from Masonic Lodge and one of these was my grandfather My grandfather was also a dentist in Sheboygan And this is my casualty coming up here from New Mexico for today's show in those days A lot of the businesses had to have two languages one English one German for obvious reasons Times have changed and now it's English and Spanish Behind me here. There's all sorts of things Different arrangements have mentioned my name in Sheboygan This was this one here is just from a show that was in Sheboygan Sheboygan Herald 1879 cigars arrowheads They're pretty self-explanatory bank banks tax certificates from the 1860s And a little further over here just some old things. I Don't even know when the first one was At the University of Wisconsin in Sheboygan. I was with the first group of the What was known as the chamber singers and we visited Germany back in 1969 We had fund ratios almost every day and didn't cost anything because we raised enough money for about 30 of us to go Oh Postcards down here in front of me The way Sheboygan was from about 1910 right there. I've got about 350 different ones Different stores put out different things to collect here's the what is this the 30th anniversary of H.C. Prangie Which most of us are going to remember I Kept this one John's bar from World War two deck of cards Sometimes I find little things Lot of companies had patches for their employees to wear Certainly I respect Sheboygan police department chair city. This goes on and on Over here we got two of my favorite pieces. I also collect coins. This is a piece of what's known as national currency Sheboygan's Charter was number 11 150 $5 bill $10 bill and $20 bills were made Usually in sheets of four if you look at this serial number, this is the first $20 bill that was made in 1929 And if my wife finds out how much I paid for it, I won't be welcome back home This one here is self-explanatory to this is from a defunct bank that went under in the last century And this is only one-sided. This is known as obsolete currency 1856 but the novel thing here it was signed by James Mead Allah Mead Library This case here is something I made. I'm a barnwood guy These are all sterling silver spoons and they all have something in the bowl saying Sheboygan or cheese churches children and There's one little one here that actually says Sheboygan 1894 some of them have the initials in the back But these are all sterling These arrowheads over here were found in the late 50s at double e and Lakeshore Drive Over here this big boards got 30 different pennants that I've collected in the last three decades This is the only one that's got Sheboygan with the airport on which is what that's 61 years old now So central stuff high schools These are the ones that are tough to get With the extreme Headdress on them with all the they're supposed to look like feathers, but it's really nice stuff on the table now down here Are all my metals Some are religious Some are political Some are schools, but if it says Sheboygan on them, I like this one. That's why I grew a beard But what if it says Sheboygan on them, and it's a metal or a ribbon? I'll try to snap it up as best that I can Central high closed in 1960 so do the math on that one These little watch fobs were really really popular so popular that they put them on these political or military reunion ribbons These are a couple of really good ones. That's I think those are both 1890 ish. I Don't even I can't read them. It could be Slavic or Polish not even sure And here are some watch fobs all with a different little belt on them very popular in the 30s and pre-war This is a check from the German Bank and that was originally at the corner of Michigan and 8th Street on the northwest corner and It closed right around World War one because of the title of the bank Germany's causing the war so it kind of went under And over here These are also Obsolete's a one a two a three and a five from the Bank of Sheboygan Now I'm going to be honest. These are all incredibly good copies. I have the originals But they're a little bit hard to travel so their home and that's that and Finally, there's my harmony bar jacket. I wear that in Albuquerque, New Mexico and people know where I'm from but they think it has to do with music because I was a band director and It's just fun wearing that and I'm just honored and thrilled to be here. So I am Rebecca Schnabel I am the collections assistant here at the Sheboygan County Historical Society and Museum and I am currently standing in the museum's loft storage area It is one of About four storage spaces we have at the museum It is one of the larger storage spaces that That we use so the main things we store here include the Mechanical animation from Prangies that we have collected over the years including some of the examples. I have out here We also have up here our Garten toy collection our locally manufactured furniture and some of our Sheboygan Turner's gymnastics equipment as well as some storage space for Some of our prop material especially for holiday memories, which most people in the area are probably quite familiar with So Seeing lots of our our storage space We make use of our high ceilings up here in the loft trying to use as much space as we can in a safe and productive way So I can just kind of take a tour through the area I have been Inventorying all of the items that are up here So first off I can start with my workspace, which is kind of over here where I've been taking Photographs doing metadata Entries Working with the space that we have Next I'll kind of show you this is where we keep our garden toys. You can see our santa land elves I have one garden toy out right now Along with the catalog that's actually from the 1930s For people to see who are here today and Along with that if we keep walking this way then We can see this is where we keep a lot of our locally manufactured furniture So we have our way furniture. We have a bench here produced by Kohler the Kohler company We have armory chairs Kind of hidden in back. We even have old stadium chairs from Legion Park. I believe it was called We have other kinds of furniture and other kinds of electronics and Couches and a lot of our chair collection you can see up top Chairs and tables as we know chairs are a major part of Sheboygan history part of the four seas of the city We have a few even Pianos and organs. There are a few things up here that were not locally manufactured This lion here, which is a favorite of everybody's was actually used in some of the windows at Prangies as well So he's part of the Prangie collection And as we come around the corner, we can see a lot more of our mechanical animation from holiday memories So you may see some things you are quite familiar with over the years and maybe some things we haven't had out for a long time Another thing a lot of people will recognize is the nativity that we have out every year So that actually lives in these specially made crates It is Objects that we spent a lot of time and resources on to conserve and repair So we had specially made storage bins made for those And so yes, if we just keep moving forward, we'll just continue to see we have What we estimate is at least around 350 pieces of mechanical animation from Prangies Boston store Yonkers from the years And we're thinking it might be even more We're just now inventorying all of it. So we'll finally have an exact answer We can also see as we look kind of this way We have some more of our prop material that we use up above for holiday memories and As we continue to move this way It's a little hard to see because we've got the panels on it here but Santa's Throne lives up here as well and then some more of our other Kind of prop mechanical props even as well as a lot of our Collection materials curtains Miniature buildings Miniature Christmas trees all sorts of things like that and Let's be honest. I saved the best for last Everybody always wants to know We all know it's really Evergreen Park, but this is also the coveted home of the great Bruce the Spruce So as everybody always wonders to you at least can kind of see this is the inside of Bruce These blue squares as you see are actually his eyes So a lot of people ask if he's mechanical. He is not we actually have a person sit inside him each Year it rotates who's in there? And they will actually look through those blue squares to be able to see you and your kids smiling faces. So Yeah, thank you so much for joining me here up in our loft space