[Ron Ramirez]

Do what I do...use a brown wafer socket from a junk Philco set of the same era. It will have the extra benefit of matching the other sockets in appearance.

I don't know this to be fact, but I suspect the tan sockets were some sort of low-loss material made for use with detector-oscillator tubes. The brown wafer sockets work just as well. I really don't know what they were thinking when they came up with those tan sockets. Obviously, they didn't suspect that people like us would be collecting, restoring, and using these radios 72 years on.