Growing up I lived in Wheeling, Illinois until I was 20. This was in the north suburbs of Chicago. This was at the edge of farm country when I was a kid, we used to play in a clump of trees (“Green Tree Island” as we called it) in the middle of a cornfield behind our subdivision. It is now just another suburb in a sea of sprawl.
About 10 miles away, or 15 if you are not a crow flying, is another anonymous suburb called Hoffman Estates. Before I got into radios in a big way the only reason I knew the name of the town is that my cousins lived there. By the time I was in high school they had moved off the St. Louis and Hoffman Estates was just another high school that our football team would lose to once a year like Arlington or Elk Grove.
I had had a scanner since I was 8 or 9 and a CB from the time I was 12 and we had places within bicycle range for crystals and parts, like a local Radio Shack and a store in Wheeling called Mykroy Electronics. This place was more of a permanent garage sale than a true retail store but they had everything a young electronics enthusiast could want.
When I started driving most of the guys I hung with also had CB’s and we used them constantly. This was the 70's and the CB craze was in full swing. Some of us also had scanners and we all had to have the best stereos in the cars. Best meant loudest so we had big speakers and bigger amplifiers; distortion be damned! We started to reach out for better stores for our growing electronics needs. CB’s, scanners and stereos were right below girls and above cars on our list of dreams. This was pretty much the story right into our 20’s when we started getting our careers started.
For some reason I have never discerned there was a crossroads in Hoffman Estates that seemed to breed electronics stores that fulfilled our wants and desires, at least in the electronics department. Within a mile of Routes 58 and 72 (Golf and Higgin Roads) there were a bundle of typical suburban strip malls. In one there was an Olsen’s Electronics and a Kenwood-based stereo center. In another was a Lafayette Electronics and an independent scanner-only shop called FCC Electronics. In a third was an Allied Electronics that was eventually rebranded to just another Radio Shack. Add to the mix several CB shops. Overall, between these malls were a half dozen other car and home stereo stores and a little later several of the new-fangled appliance megastores like Fretters that were a big flash on the pan in the 80’s. These had big TV’s, big stereos and even bigger speakers to go with microwave’s, mixers and trash compactors.
Why this area of an anonymous suburb in a sea of sprawl bred such a bevvy of cool electronics stores one will probably never know. Maybe it was due to a scientifically chosen retail dynamics study or collusion between the various companies to draw in electronics nerds like myself to the area. Of course it could just have been a matter of chance, cheap retail rents and availability meeting needs but I like my other theories better. What the real reason was probably had something to do with the location of Woodfield Mall a few miles down the road that spurred retail development for most of the area at the time. Woodfield was at the time the world’s largest mall and transformed the area from sleepy farms to suburban sprawl. It even boasted 2 Radio Shack stores!
When I was in high school a typical Friday night went like this: I would call Dan and see if he had any leads on possible dates for the night unless he called me first. Then one of us would call John or Ricky. If none of us had any prospects (and thus her friends for the rest of us) we would meet up at the local ice cream place. From there we would all drive our own cars down to either A: The local National Pride self car wash; B: Golf and Higgins for the electronics stores or C: one of the local roller rinks. If we were lucky and had girls with us we would usually do the same things but with less enroute flatulence.
When we had steady girlfriends we would have to so some other things occasionally to appease them on occasion but we weren’t happy about it. Most of the breakups went: “What are we doing tonight”, “Scanner store again?” followed by “I think we should see other people”. Of course by then she probably already was seeing someone else but just hedging her bets.
By the time I was in college (coincidently not far from the aforementioned Hoffman Estates) these places started closing up. First it was Lafayette, then Olsen’s. Allied changed to Radio Shack, Fretters and the other mega stores flamed out then the stereo stores started closing. The crushing blow was FCC Electronics. This place hung on for a long while. They went thru some difficulties when the local police switched to the new-fangled 800 MHz. radio system which the scanners of the day could not hear. FCC Electronics sold a converter that allowed one to hear these new channels with existing scanners and when the local police heard about that they tried to shut them down. They were not successful, there was no law against listening in and FCC sold hundreds of these converters to scanner enthusiasts and regular people. Eventually they could not compete with Radio Shack, Sears and Montgomery Wards, all of which sold scanners as well. When they closed down it felt like a nail was driven into my scanner.
Fast forward a few years and the ranks of dedicated scanner stores have been decimated. The well-known independent scanner stores like Lake Shore Electronics in Burlington ON or a couple places in the L.A. area are gone. Olsen’s is long gone, Allied and Lafayette were absorbed by Radio Shack 30 years before Radio Shack itself imploded and left the planet. The “Big Box” electronics places like Fry’s, Computer City and others flew the coop. While MicroCenter has a small selection of electronic components they do not have any communications stuff worth buying. The only place to go into and buy a CB these days is a truck stop. For a couple years in the 1990's my friend Ted owned a scanner-only store called "The Command Post" on the far north edge of Chicago but there just wasn't enough business to keep it going.
The only place I know of one can even see a scanner in operation and buy one over the counter these days is Ham Radio Outlet. While there are several dedicated scanner retailers online or on the phone like Scanner Master, I really miss the days when one could shop in person at multiple locations for different scanners, there were multiple brands other than the one and a half we have now.
Uniden’s scanners are the king these days. Whistler still sells the same scanners that were designed 20 years ago for Radio Shack by GRE. Regency, Plectron, Cobra, Robyn, Midland, GRE, RCA, Fanon, MacDonald, Tennelec, Sonar and JIL were all brands of scanners or receivers I have had over the years. They are all gone. Let's not forget the department stores that sold scanners, Sears, Wards and Penny's all sold scanners, usually Bearcats. They often sold standard Bearcat models with the store name emblazoned upon them. Many malls in the 80's had all three stores and one could get 4 versions of the BC220XLT, with Sears, Penny's and Wards names from the department stores and Sears usually sold them under the Bearcat name as well.
About 10 miles away, or 15 if you are not a crow flying, is another anonymous suburb called Hoffman Estates. Before I got into radios in a big way the only reason I knew the name of the town is that my cousins lived there. By the time I was in high school they had moved off the St. Louis and Hoffman Estates was just another high school that our football team would lose to once a year like Arlington or Elk Grove.
I had had a scanner since I was 8 or 9 and a CB from the time I was 12 and we had places within bicycle range for crystals and parts, like a local Radio Shack and a store in Wheeling called Mykroy Electronics. This place was more of a permanent garage sale than a true retail store but they had everything a young electronics enthusiast could want.
When I started driving most of the guys I hung with also had CB’s and we used them constantly. This was the 70's and the CB craze was in full swing. Some of us also had scanners and we all had to have the best stereos in the cars. Best meant loudest so we had big speakers and bigger amplifiers; distortion be damned! We started to reach out for better stores for our growing electronics needs. CB’s, scanners and stereos were right below girls and above cars on our list of dreams. This was pretty much the story right into our 20’s when we started getting our careers started.
For some reason I have never discerned there was a crossroads in Hoffman Estates that seemed to breed electronics stores that fulfilled our wants and desires, at least in the electronics department. Within a mile of Routes 58 and 72 (Golf and Higgin Roads) there were a bundle of typical suburban strip malls. In one there was an Olsen’s Electronics and a Kenwood-based stereo center. In another was a Lafayette Electronics and an independent scanner-only shop called FCC Electronics. In a third was an Allied Electronics that was eventually rebranded to just another Radio Shack. Add to the mix several CB shops. Overall, between these malls were a half dozen other car and home stereo stores and a little later several of the new-fangled appliance megastores like Fretters that were a big flash on the pan in the 80’s. These had big TV’s, big stereos and even bigger speakers to go with microwave’s, mixers and trash compactors.
Why this area of an anonymous suburb in a sea of sprawl bred such a bevvy of cool electronics stores one will probably never know. Maybe it was due to a scientifically chosen retail dynamics study or collusion between the various companies to draw in electronics nerds like myself to the area. Of course it could just have been a matter of chance, cheap retail rents and availability meeting needs but I like my other theories better. What the real reason was probably had something to do with the location of Woodfield Mall a few miles down the road that spurred retail development for most of the area at the time. Woodfield was at the time the world’s largest mall and transformed the area from sleepy farms to suburban sprawl. It even boasted 2 Radio Shack stores!
When I was in high school a typical Friday night went like this: I would call Dan and see if he had any leads on possible dates for the night unless he called me first. Then one of us would call John or Ricky. If none of us had any prospects (and thus her friends for the rest of us) we would meet up at the local ice cream place. From there we would all drive our own cars down to either A: The local National Pride self car wash; B: Golf and Higgins for the electronics stores or C: one of the local roller rinks. If we were lucky and had girls with us we would usually do the same things but with less enroute flatulence.
When we had steady girlfriends we would have to so some other things occasionally to appease them on occasion but we weren’t happy about it. Most of the breakups went: “What are we doing tonight”, “Scanner store again?” followed by “I think we should see other people”. Of course by then she probably already was seeing someone else but just hedging her bets.
By the time I was in college (coincidently not far from the aforementioned Hoffman Estates) these places started closing up. First it was Lafayette, then Olsen’s. Allied changed to Radio Shack, Fretters and the other mega stores flamed out then the stereo stores started closing. The crushing blow was FCC Electronics. This place hung on for a long while. They went thru some difficulties when the local police switched to the new-fangled 800 MHz. radio system which the scanners of the day could not hear. FCC Electronics sold a converter that allowed one to hear these new channels with existing scanners and when the local police heard about that they tried to shut them down. They were not successful, there was no law against listening in and FCC sold hundreds of these converters to scanner enthusiasts and regular people. Eventually they could not compete with Radio Shack, Sears and Montgomery Wards, all of which sold scanners as well. When they closed down it felt like a nail was driven into my scanner.
Fast forward a few years and the ranks of dedicated scanner stores have been decimated. The well-known independent scanner stores like Lake Shore Electronics in Burlington ON or a couple places in the L.A. area are gone. Olsen’s is long gone, Allied and Lafayette were absorbed by Radio Shack 30 years before Radio Shack itself imploded and left the planet. The “Big Box” electronics places like Fry’s, Computer City and others flew the coop. While MicroCenter has a small selection of electronic components they do not have any communications stuff worth buying. The only place to go into and buy a CB these days is a truck stop. For a couple years in the 1990's my friend Ted owned a scanner-only store called "The Command Post" on the far north edge of Chicago but there just wasn't enough business to keep it going.
The only place I know of one can even see a scanner in operation and buy one over the counter these days is Ham Radio Outlet. While there are several dedicated scanner retailers online or on the phone like Scanner Master, I really miss the days when one could shop in person at multiple locations for different scanners, there were multiple brands other than the one and a half we have now.
Uniden’s scanners are the king these days. Whistler still sells the same scanners that were designed 20 years ago for Radio Shack by GRE. Regency, Plectron, Cobra, Robyn, Midland, GRE, RCA, Fanon, MacDonald, Tennelec, Sonar and JIL were all brands of scanners or receivers I have had over the years. They are all gone. Let's not forget the department stores that sold scanners, Sears, Wards and Penny's all sold scanners, usually Bearcats. They often sold standard Bearcat models with the store name emblazoned upon them. Many malls in the 80's had all three stores and one could get 4 versions of the BC220XLT, with Sears, Penny's and Wards names from the department stores and Sears usually sold them under the Bearcat name as well.
