G & F Searchlight Radio

My interest in radio is mostly history and programming. I accumulate books, and ephemera. I'm not particularly a collector of radios themselves. But I do recognize an unusual table radio when I see one. This stood out to be when I saw it.

I saw this on an auction website where bidding went into the thousands of dollars. There's another on eBay right now that is almost up to two thousand dollars. It's unlike anything I have seen before. As a table radio it's enormous. It's almost 19" tall, over 14" wide and 7" deep. That's as big as some televisions. The base alone is 6" x 7".  It tunes AM and shortwave, and apparently can be precisely rotated to optimize reception; though the label on the back recommends adding a 50 foot aerial.

Radiomuseum.org dates this model to 1937/1938. Apparently it was also called a Spy-Glass or Disk-shaped radio. It's clearly a novelty radio. What unusual about it is primarily the cabinet. It's unclear how much it's directionality aided reception. If it was a wild success I imagine there would have been a whole genre of like devices and not just this lone mutant. The label on the back reads "G&F sales patent applied for..."  Paul Turney did the sleuthing to find the patent #109,040 granted to Irwin Feitler November 9th 1937.  More here.

Irwin Feitler is the "F" in G&F. The G belongs to either Gardner or Granger of Gardner & Co. with whom G&F shared an office at 2309 S. Archer Ave, Chicago. Pacific Radio Corp. located at 844 W. Adams St in Chicago made the chassis and the radio was a clone of the Pacific Radio Corp. Model 3, (Rider 9-1).  Yes, Rider as in John F. Rider of the Rider Troubleshooting Guides. The Searchlight must not have been a success as Feitler never dabbled in radio again.

By the 1940s Irwin Feitler was listed in court documents as the "sole general partner" of Gardner & Co. He was in trouble for not paying excise taxes between 1935 to 1938. So Those Search Light radios were selling but he wasn't paying the IRS. Unexpectedly I found a wedding announcement in the Reform Advocate of May 1925 by Mr. and Mrs. Gombrig of 5108 Kimbark Ave. announced the engagement of their daughter Bernice to Irwin Feitler, son of Mr. and Mrs. Adolph Feitler. He was back in court in with a new partner, his wife, Bernice Feitler in 1942. That happened a lot.

But his name also appears in 1950 in court documents regarding an investigation of Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce. There the address of Gardner & Co. is given as 2222 South Michigan Ave, and the company is self-described as "the biggest punch board manufacturer in the world." Their gross sales exceeded 1 million dollars that in 1947, down from 1.8 million in 1943. That's 14 million in 2025 dollars. Punch boards were banned in many states as it was gambling-like in nature. They were somewhat similar to scratch off tickets. Gambling author John Scarne estimated that 50 million punchboards were sold in 1939 alone, at the peak of their popularity.

In 1951 the FTC ordered that Gardner & Co. cease operations for selling games of chance and lottery schemes. Other employees/family members were named in the judgement: Everett J. Granger, Mame Partin, Frances Martin, Hattie Gardner and Thekla Maas. Feitler immediately requested a writ of certiorari from the U.S. Court of Appeals, 9th circuit, a judicial review in 1953 for Feitler v. Federal Trade Commission (docket No. 804). It was denied.