PULLING THE PLUG (The History Of Heathkit) By Ron Grossman ST. JOSEPH, Mich. - A factory here is shortly to become the Wailing Wall of a now-graying generation of nerds. In reveries of adolescence, our thoughts will return to this resort town on Lake Michigan's shores, about 75 miles northeast of Chicago. For decades that nondescript industrial building was home of Heathkit, which made it a fairy castle to every man and boy who ever dreamed of becoming a new Thomas Edison or Guiglielmo Marconi. Women remember the Heathkit phase of American history differently, given that 90 percent of the customers for the company's line of electronic gadgets in kit form have been males. Many a wife and girlfriend spent the 1950s and '60s wondering why the man in her life preferred cuddling up with a soldering iron and a bunch of vacuum tubes to taking her out for an evening of dining and dancing. Other women spent the era hectoring husbands to finish the FM radio or television set whose half-assembled components cluttered basements and closet shelves. Their daughters will suffer none of that. Alas, Heathkit is no more. William E. Johnson, president of Heath Co., has announced that it will no longer produce its do-it-yourself product line. Once the factory's remaining stock of Heathkits is exhausted, electronic putterers and garage and workshop inventors will have to find alternative outlets for their creative juices. Actuarial tables, Johnson explained, dictated the decision to abandon the kits in favor of concentrating the company's energies on its highly successful line of consumer electronic products. With each passing year, the Grim Reaper takes away an increasing proportion of the customer base for Heathkits, while the shifting mores of young Americans prevent the company from finding sufficient replacements. "Do your kids have the patience to sit down and build their own stereo set over the course of several evenings or a weekend?" Johnson asked. "Mine don't. They want to buy one at a store, so they can listen to it the very same day." But to lots of males born before the age of instant gratification, a stereo or radio was not just a source of entertainment. In kit form, it also provided the even sweeter music of what Johnson calls the "Eureka Complex." It was an experience Johnson himself never tasted before coming to Heath as a marketing director about 30 years ago. He didn't think of himself as particularly handy. So he was skeptical when his boss suggested that the best way to get a feel for the company's products was to take a kit home to build. "My neighbor laughed when he saw me sitting at the kitchen table assembling electronic parts on a circuit board," Johnson said. "But I was so excited when I finished, I pounded on his door at midnight to come hear a transistor radio I'd made with my own two hands." The afterglow of such a personal triumph is long lasting, Johnson added, noting that he went on to assemble more than 200 more Heathkits. The little curl of smoke that rises from a soldering iron as it joins resistors and condensers can induce an intoxicating habit. So Johnson wasn't surprised by the results of a consumer survey he once commissioned. The consultant firm he hired reported: "You don't have customers. You have evangelical loyalists." "The consultants also said they lost money working on our account," Johnson recalled. "They were used to spending about 15 minutes on each customer interview. But Heathkit fans would talk their heads off for an hour or more, pointing out the virtues of all the TV sets and weather monitors they had built over the years." "Tell you the truth, I've lost count of how many Heathkits I've built," observed Parrish, 65, an insurance premium auditor. "But for many years there, I built every new kit as soon as they put it in their catalog." Johnson noted that Heathkit's partisans came from all walks of life. Former Sen. Barry Goldwater, a long-time amateur radio buff, has assembled 75 to 100 kits, Johnson reported. "One Christmas, Sen. Goldwater built six of our Trashmasters to give as presents," Johnson said. Given such loyalty, Johnson dreads having to sit down this June to write his customers a Dear John letter. In it, he will tell them they will no longer receive the catalogs through which the company periodically announced wonders of modern electronics available by return mail in kit form. Time was when lots of American households measured the passing by arrival of the Heathkit catalog. Spring, summer, fall, and especially as Christmas drew near, the postman would deposit in their mailboxes a 100 page brochure with colorful renderings of families gathered around a big-screen projection TV or a pinball machine that Dad had built. A 1983 catalog cover showed the proud parent of a Heathkit robot diabolically grinning at the electronic slave he had just wired together. For awkward adolescents of yesteryear, the Heathkit catalog was a kind of electronic-age equivalent of the Book of Psalms: something to be read in moments of despair and discomfort. When word of the Heathkit's demise started seeping out, a number of long-time fans called the factory to express their regrets, notes company spokeswoman, Paula Hancock. Some recalled how they used to take the catalog to high school dances. "They explained that they would bury their noses in the Heathkit catalog," Hancock said, "because they were to shy to speak to girls." The Heathkit's origins can be traced back to the dreams of Ed Heath, perhaps the ultimate partisan of the do-it-yourself philosophy of life. A barnstorming pilot in the early days of flying, he founded the Heath Airplane Co. in a factory on Chicago's Sedgwick Street in the 1920s. There he designed a small, affordable airplane, which he christened the Parasol. "Heath sold both fully assembled planes and kits for folks to build in their garages," Johnson said. "Some customers would but their Parasol a wing at a time, for say $100 each, until they had all the parts necessary to get their airplane up and flying." In fact, Heath's kits were assembled by thousands of amateur aviators across the country. But in 1931, Heath died in a test flight crash. Shortly afterward the federal government enacted strict regulations governing home-brewed aircraft, which bankrupted the company. Its surviving assets were moved to Michigan, where the company was acquired by Howard Anthony in 1936 for a few hundred dollars. Anthony added two-way radios to Heath's airborne offerings, and the company's fortunes improved during World War II when it got government contracts to produce airplane parts for the military. One day shortly after the war, Anthony got a call from an electronics parts dealer who was helping to liquidate the government's surplus stocks. Sight unseen, Anthony agreed to buy three box-car loads. Then he rushed to his banker to borrow the money he needed to consummate the deal. When the railroad cars arrived at his factory, Anthony found that among the other gadgets he now owned were 1,000 oscilloscope tubes. An oscilloscope displays the mathematical curve corresponding to a given electronic circuit, which makes it an invaluable diagnostic tool for repairmen and technicians. At the time, an oscilloscope tube sold for $50 or more. But Anthony had bought his for about 50 cents each. That allowed him to package a tube plus all the other components necessary to build an oscilloscope and sell the lot, along with a schematic diagram of how to assemble the device, for $39.50 each. With minimal advertising, this first Heathkit was an overnight success upon its introduction in 1947. So Anthony began packaging additional sets of electronic parts that could be assembled into other testing devices and amateur radio equipment. Within three years, the company was selling $4 million worth of kits a year. In the 1970s, when the catalog included some 400 kits and accessories, sales of Heathkits topped out at about $60 million a year. By then, the simple diagram of the early kits had been replaced by elaborate manuals that walked a Heathkit builder through the process, step by step. Those manuals also explained to novices the theory underlying the gadgets they were assembling and, eventually, Heathkit developed a line of laboratory-quality kits designed to demonstrate basic electronic principles. Widely adopted by American schools, those kits helped upgrade the teaching of science at the secondary and college level. Heathkit also established a telephone consultation service, so that the stumped constructors could share their frustrations with a technician at the factory. Heathkit's much-trumpeted motto was: "We will not let you fail." That parlay of quality parts and shared know-how enabled even rank amateurs to construct cutting-edge electronic equipment. In the 1950s, the tinny sound of prewar phonographs gave way to sophisticated amplifiers and speakers labeled "high fidelity." Stereophonic sound was introduced, and TV moved out of the laboratory and into America's living rooms. Heathkit's customers often were able to build such equipment long before their neighbors could buy factory-produced versions in department stores. When computers were still massive, big- bucks items that only corporations could afford, Heathkit was offering a do-it-yourself version powered by vacuum tubes. Clifford Burr, who lives in Kenmore, N.Y., built a Heathkit color TV soon after the networks began transmitting in color. "When I finished, I was so excited to see color TV, I lugged the chassis upstairs without even mounting it to the cabinet," the 77-year-old Burr said. "I turned the set on, and my mother- in-law thought I was a genius." When he recently learned of Heathkit's impending demise, Burr went around the house taking inventory of the kits he had built. At 100, he stopped counting, says Burr, who built kits not just for his family's pleasure, but also to equip a TV repair shop that he operated. When he retired about 15 years ago, Burr gave away his oscilloscope to a young friend with a passion for electronics. Built from Heathkit's first kit, that oscilloscope was still in perfect working order after 27 years of continual use on Burr's workbench. Burr wasn't the only one to start a business with Heathkits. A few years back, the Heath Co. wanted to cook up a deal with Digital Equipment Corp., a leading computer manufacturer. Wise in the ways of the corporate world, Johnson expected to be put off initially with a my-people-will-get-back-to-your-people runaround. Instead, he soon found himself in the office of Kenneth Olsen, Digital's founder and chief executive officer. "Olsen said he was grateful for what Heathkit had done for him when he was just starting out in the 1960s," Johnson said. "Olsen explained he had had only a limited amount of funds. So he took half his money and built Heathkits to equip a laboratory for his fledgling company." In the end, Heathkits fell victim to the same rapid progress in electronics that initially made them popular. Early Heathkits were powered by vacuum tubes whose filaments cast an eerie orange light on the builder's hands. Their components had to be connected, piece by piece, so that their chassis seemed stuffed with spaghetti-like masses of electrical wire. But vacuum tubes have long since given way to transistors, and printed circuit boards largely have done away with hand wiring. A single electronic chip is now the equivalent of the dozens and dozens of resistors and condensors that used to fill a Heathkit builder's workbench to overflowing. In recent years, many kits required only minimal assembly, thus robbing their constructors of the Eureka Complex that an earlier generation of Heathkit fans experienced. So young people no longer get the kick they once did from building a shortwave radio and hearing voices from across the oceans, notes H. L. Parrish, the North Carolinian who used to assemble kits as fast as Heath's engineers could design them. Today, an adolescent with a taste for high-tech adventures is more likely to become a computer hacker. "I can't see the kick of staring at a computer screen," Parrish said. "To me, there is no excitement like that of plugging in a radio you've just built, then seeing those vacuum tubes begin to glow just a moment before the first sound comes out of the loudspeaker."