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Originally Posted by maxm
Zenith had another plant in Missouri in the 80s, it seems like they made mostly little 13" color sets there, I have one of them.
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I have a 19" Zenith color set, new in 1995, which was assembled in Mexico, but the company was still in the Chicago area as "Zenith Electronics Corporation" of Glenview, Illinois. I had another Zenith color set in the '80s which had a label on the back clearly proclaiming "Zenith Electronics Corporation" in Missouri (don't recall the city off the top of my head). I also had a Zenith four-mode stereo system with 8-track, etc., in the early eighties which was built for Zenith in Korea by an unnamed electronics firm.
IMO, I think Zenith as we used to know it actually disappeared years before they sold out to Gold Star, given the fact that much of Zenith's audio gear was made offshore by the '80s (my 1980 Zenith R-70 AM/FM radio was made in Korea, also, to the standards of Zenith in Chicago, and my H-480 AM/FM stereo Zenith clock radio [also 1980 vintage] was built in Taiwan) and their televisions were being made offshore by then as well (yes, even their fabulous System 3 color consoles, but the ones built in the '70s must have still been made half decently; I have a friend whose parents owned a System 3 console set with remote and had it 15 years before it finally conked out--they replaced it with a 25" RCA "Guide Plus" set that went all of two years before the CRT blew, but that's another story).
Every new Zenith TV I've owned since the late '70s was actually built either in Mexico or offshore. The only American-made Zenith radios I own anymore, however, are my H511Y (1951) and my Royal 1000-1 TO (Zenith's first transistorized T/O; mine was probably one of the first, built by the original Zenith Radio Corporation in Chicago), not to mention a wood-cased K-731 AM/FM set from 1963. You can be sure I'll hold on to these three radios, as they are pieces of Zenith history the likes of which we will never see again. I like the design, sound and the superb build quality of the R-70 as well, so that one will be a "keeper" also. Had the dickens of a time finding a replacement for a missing battery box for my T/O (finally found one a couple months ago at John Kendall's Vintage Electronics of suburban Baltimore, on his website), but it was worth it for a radio so well built and which sounds every bit as good as a good table set.