What Happened to Allied Radio? | The Store RadioShack Buried

The catalog came in the mail on a Tuesday afternoon and it was thick enough to prop open a door. Four hundred pages of radios, amplifiers, speakers, shortwave receivers, oscilloscopes, soldering irons, and a section in the middle called Knight-Kit where they sold things a twelve-year-old boy could build with his own hands. You circled what you wanted in pencil and left it on the kitchen table and hoped your parents would notice. Allied Radio Corporation sat at 100 North Western Avenue in Chicago and it was the largest electronics supplier in America. The store had a listening room where music sounded better than anything you had ever heard. The parts bins had every resistor and capacitor sorted by value in cardboard drawers with handwritten labels. And the Knight-Kits on the display wall were the reason you mowed lawns and shoveled driveways, because a Knight-Kit Star Roamer shortwave receiver cost fourteen ninety-five and at the end of three evenings of soldering you were going to hear a voice from Tokyo in your own bedroom. On April 13, 1970, the Tandy Corporation bought Allied Radio for thirty million dollars. They renamed the stores Allied Radio Shack. Then the Knight-Kits disappeared. Then the Fisher receivers and Pioneer turntables disappeared. Everything was replaced with RadioShack house brands. By 1973 the Allied name was gone from every storefront. The federal government ordered Tandy to sell the remaining Allied stores, but by then there was nothing left to sell. The shelves had been stripped. The catalog stopped arriving. The building on Western Avenue went dark. RadioShack itself went bankrupt in 2015. The company that swallowed Allied was eventually swallowed by the same forces it had set in motion. But the catalog is still in a box somewhere. The pencil circles are still there. And what Allied taught you is still in your hands. If you built a Knight-Kit or remember the Allied catalog, tell us in the comments what you built. That catalog may be gone, but what it started never stopped. #alliedradio #knightkit #radioshack #electronics #hamradio #shortwave #soldering #nostalgia #1960s #beforeitvanished #chicago #catalog #vintage #electronicsnostalgia #hobbyist