PHILCORADIO.COM - Meet Ron Ramirez, owner of this website.

Ron Ramirez (self-portrait from December 2009)

Since 1974, at age 14, I have been interested in antique radios. James A. Fred's "Antique Radio Corner," a regular column in the old Elementary Electronics magazine, served as my introduction to the hobby. I graduated from National Radio Institute (NRI) in 1984 with a diploma in Radio-TV Servicing. (Unfortunately, NRI, which had been around since the early days of radio, went out of business in 2002.) I immediately put my new diploma to work as a sideline business, repairing televisions and radios when I was not on the air, working at the local radio station as an on-air personality, producer and technician. Unfortunately, the inner workings of televisions soon became miniaturized to the point that they could no longer be serviced profitably, and I gave up this sideline - for awhile.

Subscribing to Antique Radio Classified

in 1987, I decided that I, too, could write articles - and did so for a number of years. These articles became a sort of training ground for what was to come next.

In 1990, I decided to move away from the 1920s battery sets I had been collecting, in order to concentrate my collecting activities on Philco radios exclusively. The word soon spread, and whenever I attended a radio swap meet, I was often greeted with "Here comes Mister Philco!" The name stuck, and as you now know, the title was not self-anointed.

Soon becoming frustrated at the lack of information available on Philco at the time, I decided to write a book on Philco. It was a monumental task, and through the help of many fellow collectors, without whose help the book would not have been possible, it became a reality in 1993.

With the initial sales of the Philco book, I re-entered the realm of electronic service - only this time, it was servicing antique radios as a sideline business. It became a full-time venture for awhile, before I rejoined the workforce and decided to go back to servicing radios part-time. Since then, I have stopped restoring radios for others in order to enter college for the first time. My major is Information Technology, and my projected graduation date is May 2011.

At right: My daughters, Kandi and Angie.

I maintain a modest collection of Philco radios, along with a large library of Philco paper material which has proven invaluable in my research. This website is the product of a great deal of work studying and researching the subject of Philco and its prinicpals, some of whose stories might otherwise had been forgotten by history.

I have been designing my own web pages since 1997. At one time I maintained websites for Chevytrucks.org, West-Techservices.com, and Thevoiceofmusic.com. These days, however, I only design and maintain my own site.

In 2008 and early 2009, I wrote a monthly opinion column in the Evansville Courier & Press newspaper.

In addition to the Philcos, I also have a small collection of Aladdin kerosene lamps, a little bit of breweriana (some signs, prints and bottles), and a few lithographs from the Victorian era.

I haved lived in a few different parts of the country throughout my life. Born in Kansas City, Missouri, my parents and I moved to Kentucky when I was 12. I finished growing up there and stayed in the Commonwealth until 2002 when I moved to Indiana. After a short stay in Newburgh and several years in Evansville, I am now living in Ferdinand, Indiana.

I have two daughters, Kandi and Angie, and I am very proud of both of them.

This website is an outgrowth of a small web page started by me in 1997, hosted on a local ISP and having relatively little information on Philco.

Before long, I found myself assuming duties running another specialty website, Chevytrucks.org. I moved my Philco site there, where it remained until Labor Day 2000 when it moved to its own website with its own domain name - Philcoradio.com. The Chevytrucks.org site is now under the capable direction of Wayne Osborne.

Since 2000, Philcoradio.com has grown exponentially. Now, with a comprehensive history of Philco and a huge online gallery showing all prewar Philco home radios, Philcoradio.com truly is the Internet's leading Philco resource.

In 2008, I embarked on an ambitious project to completely redesign all of the pages on this site and to add more information. The task is not yet complete, but here are some of the accomplishments I have made since that time:

    * Redesigned all pages save for the History section;
    * Began to incorporate CSS in all new pages in 2010;
    * Completely rebuilt the Philco Radio Gallery in January-March 2010;
    * Added the new Restoration Notebook section, March 2010.

In February 2010, I also moved the site to a new hosting company, Bluehost.

The work on this site continues as time allows. You can keep up with the latest updates by reading my blog, Ron's Random Ramblings.

Thanks for visiting and supporting this website!