Gold Medal Software 3/Gold Medal Software - Volume 3 (Gold Medal) (1994).iso/misc/hod003.arj/FILE5.003

Text File | 1994-03-20 | 8KB | 150 lines

                        THE DEMISE OF THE HEATHKIT
              Taken from the January 1994 SATERN newsletter

        ST. JOSEPH, Mich.       A factory here is shortly to become the
 wailing wall of a now-graying generation of "nerds".

        In reveries of adolescence, our thoughts will return to this resort
 town on Lake michigan's shores, about 75 miles northeast of Chicago. For
 decades that nondescript industrial building was home to Heathkit, which
 made it a fairy castle to every man and boy who ever dreamed of becoming
 a new Thomas Edison or Guigliemo Marconi.

        Women remember the Heathkit phase of American history differently,
 given that 90 percent of the customers for this company's line of
 electronic gadgets in kit form have been males.

        Many a wife and girlfriend spent the 1950s and '60s wondering why
 the man in her life preferred cuddling up with a soldering iron and a
 bunch of vacuum tubes to taking her out for an evening of dining and
 dancing. Other women spent the era hectoring husbands to finish the FM
 radio ot television set whose half-assembled components cluttered basements
 and closet shelves. Their daughters will suffer none of that.

        Alas, Heathkit is no more.

        William E. Johnson, president of Heath Co., has announced that it
 will no longer produce the do-it-yourself product line. Once the factory's
 remaining stock of Heathkits is exhausted, electronic putterers and
 garage/workshop inventors will have to find alternative outlets for their
 creative juices.

        Actuarial tables, Johnson explained, dictated the decision to abandon
 the kits in favour of concentrating the company's energies on it's highly
 successful line of consumer electronic products. With each passing year,
 the Grim Reaper takes away an increasing proportion of the customer base
 for Heathkits, while the shifting mores of young North Americans prevent the
 company from finding sufficient replacements.

        "Do your kids have the patience to sit down and build their own
 stereo set over the course of several evenings or a weekend?" Johnson asked.
 "Mine don't. They want to buy one at the store, so they can listen to it the
 very same day."

        But to lots of males born before the age of instant gratification,
 a stereo or a radio was not just a source of entertainment. In a kit form,
 it also provided the even sweeter music of what Johnson calls the "Eureka
 Complex".

        It was an experience Johnson himself never tasted before coming to
 Heath as a marketing director about 30 years ago. He didn't think of himself
 as particularly handy. So he was sceptical when his boss suggested that the
 best way to get a feel for the company's products was to take a kit home to
 build.

        "My neighbour laughed when he saw me sitting at the kitchen table
 assembling electronic parts on a circuit board," Johnson said. "But I was
 so excited when I finished, I pounded on his door at midnight to come hear
 a transistor radio I'd made with my own two hands."

        The afterglow of such a personal triumph is long lasting, Johnson
 added, noting that he went on to assemble more than 200 more Heathkits.
 The little curl of smoke that rises from a soldering iron as it joins
 resistors, capacitors, and inductors can induce an intoxicating habit.

        So Johnson wasn't suprised by the results of a consumer survey he
 once commissioned. The consultant firm he hired reported: "You don't have
 customers. You have fanatical loyalists."

        "The consultants also said that they lost money working on our
 account," Johnson recalled. "They were used to spending 15 minutes on each
 customer interview. But Heathkit fans would talk their heads off for an hour
 or more, pointing out the virtues of all the TV sets and weather monitors
 they had built over the years."

        "Tell you the truth, I've lost count of how many Heathkits I've
 built," observed Parrish, 65, an insurance premium auditor. "But for many
 years there, I built every new kit as soon as they put it in their catalog."

        Johnson noted that Heathkit's partisans came from all walks of life.
 Former Sen. Barry Goldwater, a long time amateur radio buff, has assembled
 75 to 100 kits, Johnson reported.

        "Once Christmas, Sen. Goldwater built six of our Trashmasters to
 give us as presents," Johnson remarked.

        Given such loyalty, Johnson dreads having to sit down this June to
 write his customers a Dear John letter. In it, he will tell them they will
 no longer receive the catalogs through which the company periodically
 announced wonders of modern electronics available by return mail in kit
 form.

        Time was when lots of North American households measured the passing
 by arrival of the Heathkit catalog. Spring, summer, fall, and especially
 as Christmas drew near, the postamn would deposit in their mailboxes a 100
 page brochure with colourful renderings of families gathered around a
 big-screen projection TV or a pinball machine that Dad had built. A 1983
  catalog cover showed the proud parent of a Heathkit robot diabolically
 grinning at the electronic slave he had just wired together.

        For awkward adolescents of yesteryear, the Heathkit catalog was a
 kind of electronic-age equivalent of the book of Psalms: Something to be
 read in moments of despair and discomfort. When word of the Heathkits
 demise started seeping out, a number of long time fans called the factory
 to express their regrets, notes company spokesperson, Paula Hancock. Some
 recalled how they used to take the catalog to high school dances.

        "They explained that they would bury their noses in the Heathkit
 catalog," Hancock said, "because they were to shy to speak to girls."

        The Heathkits origins can be traced back to the dreams of Ed Heath,
 perhaps the ultimate partisan of the do-it-yourself way of life. A barn
 storming pilot in the early days of flying, he founded the Heath Airplane
 Co. in a factory on Chicago's Sedgwick street in the early 1920s. There he
 designed a small, affordable airplane, which he christened the Parasol.

        "Heath sold both fully assembled planes and kits for folks to build
 in their garages," Johnson said. "Some customers would build their Parasol
 a wing at a time, for say $100 each, until they had all the parts necessary
 to get their airplane up and flying."

        In fact, Heath's kits were assembled by thousands of amateur aviators
 across the country. But in 1931, Heath died in a test flight crash. Shortly
 afterward the United States federal government enacted strict regulations
 governing home-brewed aircraft, which bankrupted the company. Its surviving
 assets were moved to Michigan, where the company was acquired by Howard
 Anthony in 1936 for a few hundred dollars. Anthony added two-way radios to
 Heath's airborne offerings, and the company's fortunes improved during
 World War II when it got government contracts to produce airplane parts for
 the military.

        One day shortly after the war, Anthony got a call from an electronics
 parts dealer who was helping to liquidate the governments surplus stocks.
 Sight unseen, Anthony agreed to buy three box-car loads. Then he rushed to
 his banker to borrow the money he needed to consummate the deal. When the
 railroad cars arrived at his factory, Anthony found among the other
 gadgets he now owned were 1,000 oscilloscope tubes.

        An oscilloscope displays the mathematical curve corresponding to a
 given electronic circuit, which makes it an invaluable diagnostic tool for
 repairmen and technicians. At the time, an oscilloscope tube sold for $50
 or more. But Anthony had bought his for about 50 cents each. That allowed
 him to package a tube plus all the other components necessary to build an
 oscilloscope and sell the lot, along with a schematic diagram of how to
 assemble the device, for $39.50 each.