{"id":4079,"date":"2019-02-10T00:00:50","date_gmt":"2019-02-10T05:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/keenerpodcast.com\/?p=4079"},"modified":"2019-02-13T09:56:11","modified_gmt":"2019-02-13T14:56:11","slug":"when-car-stereo-shops-ruled","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/keener13.org\/?p=4079","title":{"rendered":"When Car Stereo Shops Ruled"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Earl “Madman” Muntz<\/strong><\/a> made the front page of the May 27th, 1967 edition of Billboard Magazine, which reported the grand opening of his Detroit tape cartridge retail store at 15268 Gratiot Avenue. The former\u00a0Kaiser-Frazer<\/a>\u00a0used car salesman was a marketing visionary, creating innovative products and selling them with crazy costumes and outrageous sales pitches.\u00a0Muntz invented the Stereo-Pak\u00a04-track tape cartridge<\/a>,\u00a0the direct predecessor of the\u00a0Stereo 8<\/a> cartridge, developed by\u00a0Bill Lear<\/a>.<\/p>\n

His Detroit operation, which ultimately sold both 8 track tapes and the automotive stereo gear that played them launched in a former Nash Rambler dealership in the heart of the Motor City’s “Auto Row” of car dealerships. \u00a0The concept soon spawned competitors. 27 year old “Crazy Jack” Frankford’s\u00a0Michigan Mobile Radio<\/strong><\/a> and former Detroit DJ Mickey Shorr<\/strong><\/a> were two of the names we often heard advertised.<\/p>\n

Entertainment in our automobiles in the 1960s was still primarily consumed through the AM radios that were ubiquitous since the Gavin Motor Company first introduced the idea in 1930. By 1967 FM was becoming popular in our homes and many of us spent a month’s pay on expensive stereo systems to render the increasingly complex production that went into the albums we bought.<\/p>\n

Taking those sounds on the road was appealing and it wasn’t long before Earl Muntz was negotiating with record companies to purpose their content onto\u00a0Stereo-Pak cartridges, based on the\u00a0endless-loop<\/a>\u00a0Fidelipac<\/a>\u00a0cartridge, a fixture in hundreds of radio station control rooms.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
\nAs interest in FM began to grow, vendors created converters that broadcast FM signals to in-dash AM radios. It wasn’t long before full fledged stereo systems were being installed under car dashboards and adapters were created to put enhanced radios where the factory units once were. Michigan Mobile Radio advertised “Stereo Sonic Sound”, \u00a0which involved a second speaker in the back of the vehicle with a delay unit that created poorly simulated stereo. In time, a whole industry emerged to build the compact amplifiers and uniquely designed speakers that we now expect to be standard equipment in our vehicles. Such was the speed of innovation that the compact cassette, invented in 1962, soon supplanted 8-Track. The format was abandoned in 1982, but car stereo stores like Mickey Shorr’s still exist to this day.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Earl “Madman” Muntz<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As for “Madman” Muntz,\u00a0A 1968\u00a0Los Angeles Times<\/i>\u00a0article noted that in one year he sold $72\u00a0million worth of cars, five years later he sold $55\u00a0million worth of TV receivers, and by 1967 he had sold $30\u00a0million worth of car stereos and tapes.\u00a0Shortly before dying of\u00a0lung cancer<\/a>\u00a0in 1987, Muntz centered his retail business on\u00a0cellular phones<\/a>,\u00a0satellite dishes<\/a>, a\u00a0motorhome<\/a>\u00a0rental company dubbed “Muntz Motor Mansions”,\u00a0<\/sup>and prefabricated aluminum houses.\u00a0<\/sup>He made headlines in February 1985 as the first retailer to offer a\u00a0Hitachi<\/a>\u00a0cellular phone for less than $1,000 ($2,300 in 2018), when just two years earlier most cellular phones had cost about $3,000\u00a0<\/sup>($7,500 in 2018 dollars). At the time of his death, he was the leading retailer of cellular phones in Los Angeles. (Wikipedia)<\/p>\n

Only Ron Popiel<\/strong><\/a>, the man who gave us the slogan, “But wait, there’s more!”, sold a greater variety of items. He’s famous for inventing the\u00a0Veg-O-Matic, the Popiel Pocket Fisherman and the Showtime Rotisserie, hawking his Ronco products himself in extended TV advertising and popular infomercials.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Earl “Madman” Muntz made the front page of the May 27th, 1967 edition of Billboard Magazine, which reported the grand opening of his Detroit tape cartridge retail store at 15268 Gratiot Avenue. The former\u00a0Kaiser-Frazer\u00a0used car salesman was a marketing visionary, creating innovative products and selling them with crazy costumes and outrageous sales pitches.\u00a0Muntz invented the Stereo-Pak\u00a04-track tape cartridge,\u00a0the direct predecessor of the\u00a0Stereo 8 cartridge, developed by\u00a0Bill Lear. His Detroit operation, which ultimately sold both 8 track tapes and the automotive stereo gear that played them launched in a former Nash Rambler dealership in the heart of the Motor City’s “Auto…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4079","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-keener","wpcat-2-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/keener13.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4079","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/keener13.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/keener13.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keener13.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keener13.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4079"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/keener13.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4079\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4130,"href":"https:\/\/keener13.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4079\/revisions\/4130"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/keener13.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keener13.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keener13.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}