Television and Radio Repair Featured in "Dragnet"
Videos for Engineers

Mr. Bob Davis, a seemingly endless source of little known and/or long forgotten historical radio and television technical trivia, apprised me of this short segment from the 1960s Dragnet television series, starring Sgt. Joe Friday. It features a guy, who turns out to be a ... well, I won't spoil it for you ... who proudly professes his thirty year career as a radio repairman. "...started back in the days of the old Crosleys, Atwater-Kents, Farnsworths. Those were real radios, well built, well designed. Nothing cheap about any of them. They didn't have transistors in those days, just tubes as big as light bulbs. That meant heavy chassis, heavy transformers, and we didn't fix them by simply slapping in a  new part, either. We fixed the old parts. I wish I had a dime for every RF coil I rewound by hand, every IF I've rebuilt..." I have the complete Dragnet series on DVD, but haven't gotten that far, yet. The other "video" is an audio recording of the Dragnet radio show that predated the TV show. First airing on August 9, 1951, it also starred Sgt. Joe Friday, and was titled, "The Big Screen." It was about the growing problem of rip-off television repairmen. It was a common theme woven in to the Mac's Service Shop series of technodramas in Radio & Television News magazine.