GROWING COMMUNITY WEDNESDAY JOURNAL, INC.
Vol. 100, No. 27
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CELEBRATING 100 YEARS
F O R E S T PA R K
REVIEW JULY 5, 2017
Forest Park’s newest gay bar PAGE 4
Video gaming wagers up PAGE 5
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Resurrecting radios
Longtime Forest Parker repairs radios out of his garage By JOHN RICE
E
Contributing Reporter
d Huether, whose family goes back to the early days of Forest Park, entered the world of radio repair when he was just seven years old. “I was a little boy walking down the alley when I saw a radio someone had thrown away,” Huether said. He brought it to the now-closed Trage Brothers electronics store on Madison Street, where Jack Wenzel ran the service department. Huether had Wenzel test the radio’s tubes. To his delight, the radio just had a burned out tube that was easily replaced. The Trages immediately offered Huether a job testing tubes. “They asked me for my Social Security number and I said, ‘What’s that?” He found himself on the Trage Bros. payroll and began repairing radios and Hi-Fi’s while he was still in grammar school at Grant White Elementary School. He learned everything about fixing radios. Wenzel taught him, “If you hear this noise, here’s what’s wrong.” Today, Huether runs The Old Radio Shop out of his Forest Park home. He has a garage crammed with vintage radios and gets repair orders from all over the US and other countries. Radio was at its peak of popularity in the late 1940’s. TV’s had not yet taken over. “I listened to cowboy programs, like Gene Autry and Roy Rogers,” Huether recalled, “They were all tube radios back then. Transistors weren’t invented until the mid-50s.” By that time, Huether was attending Proviso High School. He graduated in 1959 and went on to De Vry See RADIOMAN on page 8
WILLIAM CAMARGO/Staff Photographer
FREQUENCY: Ed Huther repairs a radio in his garage on June 30. After retiring, he turned his garage into a work station to fix analog radios for which there is still a demand.
With 911 dispatch transition underway, residents may need to shift behavior State law forced Forest Park to switch by July 1 By THOMAS VOGEL Staff Reporter
A 44-year-old Forest Parker dialed 911 early in the morning in the first week of June after a neighbor alleged-
IN Big Week . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7 THIS Classified . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 ISSUE Crime . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .9 Opinion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
ly pulled a semi-automatic handgun on him, following a parking dispute. The voice on the line asked him what town he was in, a surprising question. At the beginning of May, Forest Park dissolved its local emergency dis-
patch center to conform to a new state law. That law, which went into effect in January 2016, mandated all municipalities under 25,000 residents join a
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