Antique and Vintage Crosley Radios

Automotive entrepreneur Powel Crosley built his first radio in 1920, as an alternative to buying a high-priced ($135) receiver for his son. He then went on to produce several low-priced, attractive models, and by 1922, Crosley was wealthy and his company was the largest radio manufacturer in the world. Crosley later bought the Cincinnati Reds baseball team, which is how the team's ballpark, Redland Field, came to be renamed Crosley Field. Crosley radios from the 1920s did not resemble the handsome cathedral, tombstone, and console models of the 1930s. Instead, they looked like something your crazy uncle would build from a kit out in the garage. These unadorned rectangular boxes, with names like the Model X, the Harko, and the Ace, were stuffed with tubes and covered with knobs, although by the end of the 1920s, some of them featured attempts at cabinetry, as in the Trirdyn Neuport and the Gembox, which featured 6 tubes, ran on alternating current rather than direct, and retailed in 1928 for $65. By the 1930s, though, Crosley was making models such as the Travo (sometimes referred to as the Model 166) in wood or metal cabinets, with the most upscale Art Deco models finished in sparkling chrome. In the 1950s, Crosley radios went plastic, made of colored Bakelite in Streamline Moderne designs that married the machined look of the 1930s with the geometry that would typify Mid-Century Modern.