The All American Five

         No, they’re not a bunch of super-heroes, but was a contraption that was sold by the millions around the world and served as the source of news and music for homes, restaurants, students in the universities or wherever a radio was to be had.  It was the radio that was also known as the AC/DC set, and it came in all sorts of shapes, colors, and sizes.  The cabinet designs were as diverse as the imagination of those who made them.  No doubt anyone who had used this radio has fond memories of it.

Why was it called the “All American Five?”  First, the original brands were from America.  Second, the "Five" refers to the number of tubes it had.  In time, manufacturers in countries from all over the world began making their versions of them, and some variants featured minor refinements either to optimize performance or just to be different, while retaining the same basic circuitry. Now affectionately known as the AA5, the AC/DC set was gradually eased out by the new transistor sets in the 1960s.

            It was my grandpa’s beside radio.  I remember it was a white Zenith, and I loved watching the pilot light change from a dim pink to a bright fiery red when the set had warmed up and started playing.  My parents had a GE in the living room.  I can still remember hearing the songs of Doris Day, Pat Boone, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Steve Lawrence, Mel Torme, Sue Thompson, Connie Francis, Timi Yuro, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., and a host of others emanating from its loudspeaker which had a sound of its own.

When I later took up a correspondence course in electronics with the National Technical Schools in California, one of the training kits they sent me was a good performing AC/DC radio that had both AM and shortwave coverage. The parts came in every two or three weeks, as it had to be slowly assembled by lessons in order to demonstrate and learn the functions of its different stages.  When it was fully assembled and finally became a full-fledged set, it regularly received the Voice of America, the BBC, NHK from Tokyo, Radio Netherlands, Deutse Welle from Germany, Radio Australia, All India Radio, etc. on my bedside each night as I surfed the bands.

Because they were very simple to construct and would almost always work the first time they were turned on, I was able to assemble a great number of these units through the years for friends and family that I lost count how many.  As such, I later became an expert on these sets. In addition to being just a radio, I was thus also able to reconfigure some for multiple functions to act as house intercoms or as phono amplifiers so that one could listen to their favorite records without having to buy a separate amplifier and speaker.

Among my collections are AA5s from different eras and I use them quite regularly, especially for shortwave listening.  Because of their age, they do act up once in a while, but they’re relatively easy to fix and keep working. Now, this may just be a subjective view, but stations seem to sound different when received on tube radios, the AA5 included.  The experience is further enhanced when receiving weak signals from remote places and the reception is interspersed with atmosphere static from distant lightning storms, with a lot of signal fading as those voices traveled a great distance, like halfway across the globe.  How you’re even able to hear them at all sometimes seems like a miracle in itself.

Experiences such as these make life richer. Our sense of wonderment should never cease.  Because indeed, modern communication has not really made the world smaller - it's only our perception of it that has.