I'm sorry I missed your thread the first time around as I also want to welcome you to the forum.
My father worked for Raytheon his entire career. Here is an excerpt about him from my book-in-progress, tentatively titled, Attics of My Life (yes, I know, not so original :p ):
Raytheon Tubes and Prototypes
In many ways, Dad met the stereotype for a German-American, Taurus, Army veteran, electrical engineer. He was by-the-book stubborn, socially and politically conservative, routine-driven, often intolerant, and disdainful of modern psychology and almost anything culturally avant-garde. This being said, he was also extremely intelligent, intellectually curious, and had a playful side which, as often as not, manifested itself in ways apropos to an engineer. This included bringing home from work cutting edge technological prototypes to play with along with his two sons.
After his stint in the U.S. Army as a medic, Dad went to college on the G.I Bill, earned a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from David & Elkins College in West Virginia, and joined the Raytheon Corporation. Dad ended up spending his entire professional career with Raytheon as a salesman in its Microwave and Power Tube Division.
In those days, to enable their salesmen to travel comfortably while impressing potential clients, a Raytheon electrical engineer salesman’s perks included receiving a new company car every year. Thus, throughout the ‘60’s, one day every year, Dad came home with a sparkling new, company-provided, Ford Galaxie 500 or Chevy Impala. This was something Mom, my brother Rich, and I anticipated joyfully. There’s nothing like the look, feel, and perhaps most importantly, smell of a brand-new car.
I’ll never forget one specific year’s new car. How could I, as it coincided with the Great Northeast Blackout of 1965. I was then 8 years old. On November 9th, in the late afternoon, a major electrical transmission line in Canada was tripped, initiating a power surge throughout the northeast United States, New York City included.
By happenstance, that very evening, Dad drove home from work in his new Galaxie 500. Along with the rest of the city, our entire Canarsie, Brooklyn neighborhood was plunged into darkness. For the first time in many New Yorkers’ memories, the evening sky was filled with visible stars with the unimpeded-by-street-lights Milky Way stretching in all its glory across the heavens. It was an awe-inspiring sight no one who experienced it would ever forget.
Lacking in-home electricity but hungry for the latest Blackout news, Mom, Rich, and I exited our home through our basement garage and cozied up inside Dad’s new Galaxie 500. And that’s how we spent the evening, listening to the Blackout news while savoring our new land yacht’s beguiling new car smell.
Like all salesmen, Dad’s trunk was always full of samples and party favors intended as enticements or gifts to potential customers. These included a variety of Raytheon labeled office supplies such as pens, pointers, rulers, and tape measures. Dad’s gift recipients weren’t limited to his customers – I, myself, still have samples of these in my home today. He also always kept on hand a variety of small plastic-on-wooden-or plastic-mounts missile replicas. Hawk and sparrow missiles were always popular with adults and kids alike. I had a lot of fun playing with those.
But Dad’s most sought after sales gifts had to have been his car trunk’s cache of new Raytheon preamp and power tubes. In those days, preamp tubes like 12AX7s and power tubes like 6L6GCs found a wide variety of uses, military and civilian. Potential clients knew Dad always had enough of these tube types in his car trunk to completely retrofit their home stereos. This made Dad a popular salesman!
I have fond memories of, on Saturday or Sunday mornings, driving with Dad to our local drugstore to test his stereo’s tubes on the drugstore’s tube tester. If any tested as weak, Dad would chuck them in a garbage can. Then we’d pick up the sundries on Mom’s drugstore shopping list. But this never included buying the drugstore’s own tubes, as Dad instead simply reached into his trunk for what he needed.
A decade or so before Dad died, I explained to him how sought after New Old Stock, or NOS, Raytheon preamp and power tubes are today by musicians. This is because one of the sole remaining modern applications for such tubes is in guitar amplifiers where, ironically, it is their very inefficiency and sound coloring characteristics that make them so desirable.
I dragged Dad to his computer and ran a quick eBay search for NOS Raytheon tubes. When Dad saw the prices they command today, he almost fell out of his chair. “Oh my,” he exclaimed, “What I used to carry around every day in my trunk would be worth a small fortune today. Had I had any idea then, I’d have saved some!”
In addition to being given by his employer a virtually bottomless supply of Raytheon paraphernalia and tubes for sales purposes, Dad had a second distinctive Raytheon perk. This was the ability, on some days, to bring home with him Raytheon prototypes for cutting edge products for my brother, Mom, him, and me to play with together.
For example, for a while, we were the first family in our neighborhood, if not the country, to have a microwave oven. That occurred when, one evening, Dad brought home with him one of the earliest Amana microwave prototypes. At the time, it was nothing short of a miracle that blew us and all of our neighborhood guests away. Though to this day, though, I wonder how much radiation it leaked and whether I should have been wearing lead-lined underwear while using it.
My best prototype memory, however, concerns a night vision scope. One evening, in the summer of 1967, Dad brought back to our Catskill Mountains bungalow a prototype night vision scope under design by Raytheon for use by the Army in Vietnam. I was, at the time, 10 years old. I recall vividly my shock, upon looking through the scope out onto the pitch black, open field behind our house, viewing grazing deer as if we were in broad, green-tinted daylight. Viet Cong would have a tough time sneaking up on a soldier sporting one of those!
Alas, the times sure have changed. Today, try bringing home a defense contractor’s prototype and you'll be lucky if you don’t go to jail!
Last edited by Jon S. on Sun Jun 07, 2026 1:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.
MY ORIGINAL MUSIC (available on all streaming platforms):
Galvanic Samurai (2021)
Traffic in the Moonlight (2023)
So Glad I Came (2023)
Desiderata (2024)
Duality (2025)
Love, Loss, Ecology, and War (2026)
Caught in the Current (2026)
Legacy (coming 2027)
Jerry would be the first to tell us, "I never spent my life copying anyone."
