This is the original Grundig-Majestic SO2U1 radio stereo console and phonograph/record player from the former Palm Springs home of Frank Sinatra, and it’s now being offered for sale with a price guide starting at $1,000 USD.
The radio unit has buttons for FM and short wave, as well as adjustments for treble and bass. It was made in West Germany by Grundig and it measures in at 35″ x 25″ x 12″, or 88.9 cm x 63.5 cm x 30.48 cm.
This is the original Grundig-Majestic SO2U1 radio stereo console and phonograph/record player from the former Palm Springs home of Frank Sinatra, and it’s now being offered for sale with a price guide starting at $1,000 USD.
History Speedrun: Grundig-Majestic
Grundig-Majestic is an almost entirely forgotten company that was he result of a short-lived but actually quite significant partnership between one of postwar Germany’s most famous electronics manufacturers and one of America’s oldest radio brands.
The German side of the equation goes back to 1930, when a young Max Grundig (born in Nuremberg in 1908) opened a radio shop called Fürth, Grundig & Wurzer in the Bavarian city of Fürth. The business did well, generating a million Reichsmark in sales by 1938, but it was the postwar period that really transformed Grundig from a retailer into a major industrial powerhouse.
In 1945, he opened a new factory in Fürth, and with radio manufacturing tightly controlled by the Allied occupation, he designed a tubeless receiver kit called the “Heinzelmann” and argued it didn’t qualify as a radio, as he had neatly sidestepped the restrictions by selling the radio as a kit and requiring the buyer to buy their own tubes.
The kits were enormously popular, and by the early 1950s Grundig had become the largest radio manufacturer in Europe. Between 1948 and 1960, the company made over 1,000 different radio models alone.
The American side of the Grundig-Majestic equation had a longer history but it was far more turbulent. Majestic Radios started out in 1927 as a product line from the Grigsby-Grunow Company of Chicago, trademarked as “The Mighty Monarchs of the Air.”
By 1928, Grigsby-Grunow was the second-largest radio manufacturer in the United States behind RCA, but the Great Depression destroyed demand for radios, and the company collapsed in 1934. The Majestic brand passed through a number of corporate owners before landing with the Wilcox-Gay Corporation, a Charlotte, Michigan-based firm best known for its “Recordio” home recording devices.
The Grundig-Majestic came about thanks to Leonard Ashbach, whose holding company already held the American rights to both Grundig and Garod Radio. In 1950, Ashbach acquired a controlling share of Wilcox-Gay and the remaining assets of Majestic Radio & Television, with the intention of manufacturing Majestic-branded products at Wilcox-Gay’s Michigan factory.
Here we see Max Grundig, the founder of Grundig and a major figure in the world of electronics – European electronics in particular. Image courtesy of Grundig.
In August of 1954, he announced that the Majestic subsidiary would begin importing Grundig radios from West Germany, distributing them through the existing Majestic dealer network via an entity called Majestic International Sales Corporation in Chicago.
Despite the high quality of the products, the partnership was undermined by Wilcox-Gay’s chronic financial instability. The company filed for bankruptcy in January of 1955, just months after the Grundig imports began, and ended its television production entirely.
Wilcox-Gay continued as the sole U.S. importer of Grundig products even after its Michigan factory closed in December of 1958, but a proposed 1961 merger with the Davega Stores chain fell through when Wilcox-Gay couldn’t meet the agreement’s cash terms.
By late December 1961, the company was bankrupt again – this time for good. Its remaining property and inventory were auctioned off in March of 1962, ending the Grundig-Majestic brand forever. Grundig continued exporting to the American market under its own name, and it remains in business to the current day.
The Ex-Frank Sinatra Grundig-Majestic Unit Shown Here
The Grundig-Majestic SO2U1 console you see here is almost certainly the most consequential single unit ever sold by the company, because it was sold new to Frank Sinatra and delivered to his legendary Palm Springs home.
This sale also includes a Sinatra record, and two framed Sinatra pictures including the fantastic one shown above.
The SO2U1 model has a built in radio at the top and a phonograph (record) player behind a door in the middle, with the speaker unit in the bottom section. Its design is quintessentially mid-century from top to bottom, and the fact that it was owned by Sinatra and used in his Palm Springs home is going to make it a perfect trifecta for collectors.
It’s now being offered for sale through Julien’s with a price guide starting at $1,000 USD and it comes with a Sinatra record album and two framed Sinatra pictures. If you’d like to read more about it or register to bid you can visit the listing here.
Images courtesy of Julien’s
Articles that Ben Branch has written have been covered on CNN, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, Autoweek Magazine, Wired Magazine, Autoblog, Gear Patrol, Jalopnik, The Verge, and many more.
Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
