Sonora, founded in 1906, gave us many beautiful radios such as this one from 1939. What was their original product when they were founded back in 1906? Hint: the bell in the logo is a clue.
Oh, this is a tough one and I never would have guessed it. Sonora was founded--originally--to make chimes. Yes, chimes--like for chiming clocks. That's what the bell is doing there in the logo. They branched into phonographs in 1907 and eventually radios and even televisions. But in the transistor era they made only TWO transistor radio models.
And it's not certain they even actually made these transistor radios at all. Though they weren't just a brand name--they were a manufacturer, with a factory and everything, they did not make this particular radio. TravLer did. We see variants of it branded TravLer, Truetone, and CBS. I remember as a kid I built the crystal radio as instructed in the World Book Encyclopedia. This was in the "R's," under "Radio." They showed you how to build a crystal set radio. So how could I not? Anyway, there was shown there a transistor radio. By that time transistor radios were small, inexpensive, and generally made in Japan. I wondered what that clunker was shown in the World Book. When I began to collect transistor radios years later, I thought it would be fun to find that radio. The photo credits the picture to CBS Radio. Probably the guy who wrote the article worked for CBS or something. Shows you the cozy relationship between corporate America and what we naively assumed to be the God's honest truth of the encyclodedia. Anyway, it was HARD to find this CBS radio.
And it wasn't easy to find this Sonora either. I was delighted to be able to locate two of them--one even in the box. This is a good illustration of the typical boxes that came with American-made transistor radios. While many Japanese radios came in nice little velvet or satin-lined, ribbon clad gift boxes, American radios typically came in this sort of plain corrugated cardboard box, diecut from one of two pieces of cardboard, which if laid flat would reveal quite an intricate and confusing design, kind of like the gerrymandered political district you are probably living in. But when folded up makes a simple, yet efficient package. I'm not taking this black radio out of the box--I figure the less I use it, the fresher this box will stay.
Here are the "Instructions for Operation" of this Sonora radio. TravLer had learned by this time to just leave the brand name off of the instructions so they had only to print one version for use with all the different brands made of this "Power-Mite" transistor radio. Yes, they were all Power-Mites--and some of them said "Super 6" on their fronts. These instructions list the model numbers for the six different color combinations in which this model could be had. Presumably this applied to all the brands-- TravLer, Truetone, Sonora, etc., but that theory's never been tested because nobody's been able to find enough of these radios to confirm it. Yes, they are fairly rare, owing, I think, to the fact that they were probably sold in Radio shops rather than in general merchandise stores that would have given them more wide distribution. The exception to this is, of course, the Truetone, which was sold in Western Auto stores coast to coast. And that would account for why we probably see more of these as a Truetone than any other brand. Still rare though, even as a Truetone. Some will take issue with my use of the word "rare," though. These sticklers for rectitude don't even consider a meteorite rare because there are more than one of them now on the earth. But if I want something--and I can't find it--that's rare enough for me.
Looking inside, we see that the battery label calls for the Wizard battery, among others. This is similar to TravLer's use of the generic instructions. Wizard was a Truetone brand and Western Auto wanted the Wizard battery to be on the battery replacement list. TravLer then just put it on the labels for all the brands and used the "Power Mite" name for the radio rather than each individual brand. We see the circuit board and though it might look quite primitive to us today, this was the height of hi tech in its day. TravLer opted to mount their chassis with the board side out, protecting the parts themselves from the curious hands of customers. I think I have an original TravLer battery for this radio, the kind of 9-volt that looks like a C-cell battery but has a snap-on terminal on either end. Yeah, there it is. It's curious that TravLer made batteries yet didn't list their own brand among the five replacements given on the radio's label. We see Eveready, Burgess, Ray-O-Vac, RCA, and Wizard, but not TravLer.
The Sonora TR-282B. The internet tells me that Sonora's last year in business was 1957, if you can believe the internet--so that dates this radio as no later than that. It could be earlier--1956--or maybe even 1955, but I doubt it. '56 or '57 sounds about right.
