Lafayette's Radios Came From Trio. Then Trio Became Kenwood

Lafayette Radio started in 1921, when a twenty-one-year-old named Abraham Pletman began selling parts by mail from New York as Wholesale Radio Service Company. By 1948 it called itself the world's largest radio supply organization. Radio Shack was then one store in Boston. You sent the coupon and waited three weeks. The front of the catalog was receivers, amplifiers and speakers; the back half was hundreds of pages of components in six-point type, every value of every resistor, tube sockets, chassis punches, knobs, terminal strips. The order form was bound in at the back and you filled it in with a pencil, adding the shipping by hand. Almost none of it was made here. The shortwave sets and the ham gear came from Japan, and many of the radios were built by Trio, later Kenwood. Lafayette's margin was the customer's uncertainty about Japanese electronics. By the mid-seventies Kenwood and Sony sold under their own names. Chapter 11 came in January 1980. 73. #hamradio #vintageradio #shortwave #cbradio #electronicshistory #swl