Radio Decals and Memorabilia

Greetings fellow radio enthusiasts,

I started collecting radio stickers and other promotional gear about a decade ago. 10 years later, I've acquired stuff from over 900 stations around the world. My goal is to reach 1000 by the end of 2016. I have a colleague who I trade with a couple of times each year, but have had a hard time finding other collectors or groups with whom I can trade. I have a list of about 275 US radio stations I'm still hoping to acquire memorabilia from at some point during my lifetime. Some stations are defunct, others no longer distribute items, and some have just not sent anything. If you would be interested in swapping stickers/radio gear, or have items that you would be interested in selling off, I would love to hear from you. Feel free to send me a PM. Thanks for your time, and all the best!

-radioguru

Are you still interested?

I have a LOT of memorabilia:

**At least 450 T-shirts, including extras, from more than 300 different radio stations, mostly USA and Canada, but some foreign as well. Most are NEW or perhaps worn once.

**About 1,500 radio station bumper stickers, window stickers, decals

**probably 20 to 30 radio station promotional license plates (generally/usually from states that don't have front tags on their cars)

**Hundreds of buttons/pins, pens, lighters, pencils and pens, keychains, and other kinds of various trinkets

**TENS OF THOUSANDS of music sheets/playlists (the great majority are "ranked" music surveys) from radio stations ALL OVER THE WORLD. This includes probably 10,000 dated earlier than 1970. I probably have about 50,000 in all. (I have been, literally, the world's most active collector over the years, and I started more than 57 years ago.)

**a quantity of paper goods such as posters, wall calendars, advertising folios, coverage maps, rate cards, etc.

**even a couple hundred 45RPM records of radio station jingles, "My Home Town" records from the early Sixties, etc.

**A couple of radio station "production" libraries - sound effects, drop-ins, etc.

**A collection of well over 200 radio station LP records: "homegrown" local music albums, etc.

Some oddball other things, such as a promotional radio that only tunes to WFMS 95.5 Indianapolis, Frisbees, a Monopoly-styled game, and other oddities of this sort.

THIS IS AFTER GETTING RID OF BOXES AND BOXES OF STUFF to other collectors over the years.

I have collected radio station memorabilia for the better part of the past 30 years, but I don't have most of it now, mainly because I donated nearly all of it to the Tennessee Radio Hall of Fame. They will eventually have a museum (probably here in Nashville) in which they display all of the items that they have collected over the years. I still collect stuff, but I am mainly looking for anything that I can donate to them. Have bought some stickers from Ebay.

Tennessee Radio Hall of Fame

I'm always curious whether radio Hall of Fames have original old radio station surveys ( music charts), especially from the 1950s. Not sure, of course, that you would necessarily know.

KFYR

Got any KFYR (Bismarck, ND)?

Todd Mitchell said:

Got any KFYR (Bismarck, ND)?

Click to expand...

Oh, I wish...that my surveys were in better order. I'm pretty sure I would have a few KFYR, but they would be scattered randomly somewhere among about 40,000 unsorted surveys. So, with all these "extra" surveys (I collect only ONE per station), they're almost useless because I can find almost nothing that anybody ever asks me about...and requests are SO bloody rare that there's no real motivation for the 100 (?) hour task of actually sorting them out.

I get maybe eight or nine requests every five years.

frankfrank said:

I'm always curious whether radio Hall of Fames have original old radio station surveys ( music charts), especially from the 1950s. Not sure, of course, that you would necessarily know.

Click to expand...

I believe that the TN Radio Hall of Fame does indeed have some surveys. I'm not sure how old any of them are, just that they have not ever gotten any from me, because I have never had any.

Do any of you attend the National Radio Club (NRC)/International Radio Club of America (IRCA) Conventions?
They have included Decalomania as a part of the event for several years. You might check with them for contact information with whoever is running the collector's part of the show.

Damn, I have to start all over. I can't use the ALT-NUMBERPAD keyboard commands here, I was trying to spell "nee" with the accent mark over the second E and it took me back to an entirely UNRELATED message that I'd sent to a different group!

Heck yeah kenglish, I go to those things!

Over the decades I've been to AS MANY AS 60 OR 70 of these conventions. Many years in the 00s-90s-late 80s I would get to two or even all three, but I always justifiably complained that sometimes all three would be scheduled as close together as BAM!-BAM!-BAM! three consecutive weekends and in entirely disparate geographical locations, followed by NEARLY FIFTY WEEKS OF **ABSOLUTELY NOTHING**. I mean, that's really stupid scheduling, no? By 2010, the scenario of there being three separate club ones (IRCA, NRC, WTFDA) was dying out - as seemingly so many meets of any kind have done with the expansion of the internet.

There's a gay website I belong to, where regional/national meets were fairly common, as many as four a year, in the middle and late 00's. (I traveled to eight of them, as far apart as Boston and Anaheim, the latter was probably the biggest one of all.) There has been no such group meet-up of any kind since 2013. Is there a national (or worldwide) trend, indeed, for group meets to vanish?

I went to the first radio club convention in 1966, in Montreal, and there were a couple more before 1971, then I was entirely able to get to these via my own means. Of course this is long before Decalcomania, nee Radiophiles. (THAT is where I tried to use that word with the accent mark.)

Yes, I hope to get to more of the IRCA/Decalcomania ones. It depends on where they are, AND WHEN. As it's ONLY IRCA that does these things anymore, they tend to be west of the Rockies, because IRCA has always been sort of the "western" DX club, with NRC being the "eastern" one. That distinction is much blurrier now, but there's still some truth to it.

They're also MUCH lower priority than in the past, because a friend went to the Seattle-area one last year, and REALLY COMPLAINED about the very same thing that would have made attendance irrelevant to me as well. Last year's apparently was distilled to almost nothing but talk-after-talk-after-talk, and radio station tours, and other formalities, and almost NO SOCIAL TIME at all. The ones I liked the most were the minimally-structured ones where one could just hang out with whoever else was there. If that aspect is almost entirely gone (as it ABSOLUTELY was at a Monitoring Times one I went to in Knoxville in the 80s, and I regretted having entirely wasted my time), my attending these things may be very unimportant to me. kenglish, have you ever been at any of these?

For me to get to these, they MUST at least somewhat conform to a general destination that I'm due to travel to, meaning that I've planned month-long trips around that one event. I think it's highly unlikely in 2021 because, if I'm ABLE to travel amid whatever COVID is doing, I'm ENTIRELY due to a massive eastern trip (well, from northern Maine, to Miami, to Houston) that may take as long as 46 to 49 days, which would make a west-of-the-Rockies 2021 convention entirely incompatible.