Radio Shack, for young people today those words have little meaning. To many older people Radio Shack was a fixture in our entertainment, hobbies, electronic related work and for some of us employment. What was and what is, isn’t the same and it’s never coming back. Society has changed way too much from those who mused to those who want to be amused.

We all have a personal story of our love of Radio Shack. Mine started out with my first set of walkie-talkies when I was a kid to a full line of communication equipment all purchased at Radio Shack. While we can’t go back to those days, we can relive some of our memories while we look through the catalogs as we did so many years back.

This site will concentrate on the years between the 60s to the 90s in what I believe was Radio Shack's heyday. I hope you will enjoy seeing some of the old goodies from Reel to Reel to CB radio to Scanners and Shortwave radios. Radio Shack had some real neat stuff way back when.

73’s

DE VE5JL  

Victoria Daily Colonist - Sep-18-1971 page 2

It would have been an amazing adventure, to have been at the right age, with the right financial backing in 1971. I would have loved to have become a franchise owner back in what is been called the golden years of Radio Shack.

I however, was too young at the time. I'm not sure how long Radio Shack offered joint ventures for Canadian stores, but from the stories I've read, many former owners and managers said it was a great time to be involved in Radio Shack in the United States.

Winnipg Free Press, November 25th 1971

While I don't consider myself to be a hoarder, I do like to keep things from my past. Here's a great example, this may not have been my first receipt from Radio Shack, it is however the oldest one I've kept.

When I found the receipt and looked at it, I remember the location of my apartment, and the location of the Radio Shack store. However, do not remember what item I purchased. I have to look that number up, and I now remember that I had to purchase this stereo preamplifier so I can play records on my new record player. The amp that I had for some reason did not have a phono input. This made all the difference in the world for me, not so much for my neighborhood below me.

The one thing I remember for sure after getting it all hooked up, was playing for the very first time, Pink Floyd's album, Wish You Were Here. And if you are familiar with the album, at the end of Have a Cigar and the beginning of the title track, Wish You Were Here, there is one part that sounds like the amplifier, or something has failed. It’s a really cool special effect that I laugh about now, but at the time I was very PO’d thinking I'd bought some junk from Radio Shack.