Interesting post! I'm reminded of the so-called "Radio Row" in downtown Manhattan that I used to visit back in the 1960s. It was either on or near Cortlandt St., if I remember correctly. At least, I used to get off the subway at the Cortlandt St. stop. The street was full of radio stores, some of them with good military surplus gear. I acquired an ARC-5 transmitter there for next to nothing, but couldn't put it on the air, since my technician class ham licence was restricted to VHF. I monkeyed around with it and tried to use it as a VFO in place of the 8 mHz crystal oscillator that was the first stage in my 2 meter transmitter. This melted a coil in the transmitter and I had to wind a new one. It also blanked out the TV downstairs.
BTW, speaking of tear jerkers, a friend and I once had summer jobs taking inventory for an auto parts supplier affiliated with GM. My friend was tasked with destroying dozens of older model Delco car radios using a sledge hammer. They were new old stock, and he said he nearly wept while smashing them to bits. Fortunately, I didn't have that responsibility. Instead, I counted small auto parts and wrote the quantities down on tickets hanging from the bins. Someone else would follow me and count the same parts, writing his count on a stub torn off my ticket, so that the accuracy could be verified.
