It's probably Bakelite and that's probably the original ivory paint. It was very common, as noted, to offer radios in either plain Bakelite or painted ivory.
Bakelite won't be hurt at all by paint stripper. My experience is that the Bakelite surface under factory paint is often wonderful, since it has been protected by paint all those years. It will be shiny, just like the unpainted models that were also sold. Think about it -- the factory didn't have separate assembly lines for painted and unpainted Bakelite cabinets. They just made, say, 100 identical cabinets and then painted 50 of them.
My Farnsworth GT-051 (
http://antiqueradio.org/farn01.htm ) had badly damaged factory paint that I removed with stripper. It looked so good after stripping that I decided to leave it unpainted (below).
If your paint looks good, I'd leave it alone. On the other hand, it's your radio, and if Farnsworth also sold that same model unpainted, it's not like you'd be creating a monstrosity by removing the paint and pretending that it was originally sold
au naturel. One drawback of leaving my set unpainted is that the knobs and dial no longer match the body color as they did before.
Phil Nelson
Phil's Old Radios
http://antiqueradio.org/index.html
