We had a 1961 GE Commander 1 B&W 13" portable (barely--the thing was so heavy, I dropped it once, but I was 7 when I did that). It had its own built-in rabbit ears...what fun that was in hilly Western Washington. In the basement of our house in North Everett, the Bellingham station, KVOS, and the British Columbia channels, CBUT, CHAN, CHEK, and CHET (in the Seventies), all came in crystal-clear while the Seattle and Tacoma stations were all snowy and phantom shadowed.
That highway phonograph was interesting, never sold well because it was expensive, and to get it to work somewhat properly they had to weigh the arm down and slow the records to 16 rpm. Problem with doing that is most people already had their records at 33 1/3 rpm and above already and weren't about to go out and buy their record collection again, and the fact that most records available at the time in 16 rpm were long speeches, sermons, etc. I'm sure the weighted armature didn't help matters much with premature record wear, and with any sort of pothole or bumpy road it probably still bounced off the record.
I suppose, anyone who had it, probably used it at 33 revs for beach parties and the like. A rich kid could've afforded one. But, that doesen't necessarily help the manufacturer reach production quotas
I knew someone who was a bit of an expert on those phonographs; he had shown me a couple copied memoranda from within Chrysler bemoaning the state of American roads that caused the skipping and record damage. Oh, so it's the taxpayer's fault, eh?
Those were introduced before their time, since the speed limit was reduced to fifty-five years later. That's still a lot of money, back then. I wonder how much that would be in today's phoney dollar
