Last Chance to Buy a New Radio - Harrisburg Telegraph c1942
Kirt's Cogitations™ #308

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Once the call to arms was sounded with the Pearl Harbor attack, the country quickly and enthusiastically converted to full wartime mode. Manufacturing plants for many kinds of products used in the various theaters of war halted production of commercial and consumer products and dedicated operations to making certain our fighting men had all the supplies and equipment needed to not just defeat the enemy but assure the battle would never reach our shores - which we did and it never did, respectively.

Makers of automobiles, trucks, ships, trains, airplanes, rifles, ammunition, clothing, footwear, television, radios, medical supplies, and other items reconfigured production lines to rapidly turn out tanks, Jeeps, and amphibious vehicles; tents, uniforms, and flags; battleships, aircraft carriers and landing craft; bombers, fighters and troop transports; first aid kits, field operating equipment, and antibiotics; portable radios, radars, and cryptograph machines. As such, a lot of common products that had been easily obtained began to disappear from store shelves and showrooms.

Advertisements like the one shown in the June 4, 1942 edition of the Harrisburg Telegraph newspaper, which I retrieved thanks to my subscription to Newspapers.com, alerted readers to the impending scarcity of new radios. A while back I posted a notice in the September 1942 issue of Radio-Craft magazine titled, "Crosley Scraps '43 Line for Military Radios." In fact, I suppose that my 1941 vintage Crosley 03CB floor console radio was probably one of the last pre-war models of a Crosley radio! It was not until the early-to-middle days of 1945 that companies began running notices that they already were or soon would be back to making products for public consumption again.