Originally Posted by venivdvici (Post 3018024)

It seems late in the game for me to ask this, but what exactly is a road techie? Didn't repairmen go to the homes for those big consoles and if they couldn't fix it there, they brought it back to the shop? I'm sure some people could carry in their portables to the shop to probably save on a house call charge.

Originally Posted by old_coot88 (Post 3018028)

A road techie was a guy doing house calls. In the truck he would carry a toolbox, tube caddy, often a second caddy of lesser-used tubes, a dot/crosshatch generator, mirror and stand, degauss coil, and furniture blankets and ropes for transporting sets to and from the shop.
When big consoles and combos weren't fixable in the home, some shops preferred to pull just the TV chassis and take it to the shop. We generally took the whole unit rather than pull the chassis. I think that's why I got a bad back today. :(:tears:

Being a road guy generally required a lower skill level than a shop tech. But most shop guys would work in both roles as needed. Then there were the "dog shooters" - hotshot techs who specialized in the really tough troubleshooting jobs from other shops.

Originally Posted by maxhifi (Post 3017972)

I'll add to the above point. The reason I made the suggestion above, is if you spend about a month or two making Radio & TV news bed time reading, you will essentially get into the head of a mid 20th century TV service man. They had articles on running a business, articles on new products, articles on how to test things, "tough dog" repairs. It's basically a slice of the whole industry. The Mac's column was a narative about a fictional repair shop where "Mac" would solve a couple tough repairs, with the help of his teenage assistant "Barney", and they would banter about current issues in TV/Radio repair, along with some corny material about Barney's girlfriend, or some sexist comments about female customers. It filled about a page to a page and a half, in every issue of Radio&TV news through the 50s. And the advertisements are a huge source of info too, giving more insight into what was going on at the time.

Technical books may be more to the point, but they are usually more dry, and don't contain the "human" element like magazines do. I think considering what you are trying to do, knowing a bit more about the "human" element would work well for you. Particularly things like how business was conducted, what customers expected, what a service call consisted of - the layout of a shop, the general demographic and social status of a repair man, etc. A bit of research will bring all this stuff into clear focus.

Originally Posted by kx250rider (Post 3018470)

I might add one more detail, and that is, most color TV owners in the 1950s & early 60s, would call out a factory service tech; not the neighborhood TV repairman. That's because most neighborhood techs claimed they'd work on color sets, but in fact many times, they'd get themselves in trouble. RCA had a service fleet in most all cities, and also many, MANY RCA sets were kept under annual service contracts, and only RCA techs would be allowed to work on the sets under that policy.

This isn't exactly important in the case of your writing, I guess, but I thought it's worth mentioning.

Charles