His store is wall-to-wall with radios, some nearly a century old, he figures he's got "a few thousand" more at home, and while he spends most every day and every night tinkering with radios from all eras, one thing you will rarely find Terry Layman doing is listening to one.
What's on today's AM and FM dial doesn't appeal to Terry, who makes a living bringing sets from the golden age of radio back to life, though as night falls he said he may switch one of his sets over to the shortwave band and listen to broadcasts from half a world away.
Terry, a former director of the Air Force Band, talks with wonder that the original owners of the sets he is restoring for customers, owns himself, or has for sale, could have listened to history in the making, like speeches by foreign leaders such as Churchill or Hitler during the lead up to World War II.
Between traveling to radio shows and swap meets and displaying his wares at the Loose Leaf Antique and Collectible Show and Sale, Terry can be found in his Indiana Avenue store, Layman's Vintage Radios, bringing neglected or otherwise worn and abused tabletop radios, console radios, and turntables back to their original working order. He'll even soup-up these old timers, if the owner so desires, to include the newfangled FM dial to allow the playing of iPods and satellite radio with an FM transmitter.
"Half of my waking hours are working on turntables anymore," he said while trying to fashion a new rubber wheel for an idler-wheel drive record player from the '60s or '70s. This is a common repair for Terry, who after a number of attempts, was happy to be able to fashion a new rubber wheel out of rubber lining once used in his backyard pond to replace the original wheel that had hardened over the years.
This ongoing battle with the ever-hardening idler-wheel has giving credence to Thomas Edison's saying that achieving success is "10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration." Terry said much of what he does with everything from record players to pre-Depression radios has proven to be a series of trial and error to find the fastest and most reliable, yet least expensive, way to fix a problem. In saving the lining from his pond, as he is known to do with anything he thinks he could use again, Terry saved himself from having to order replacement wheels at $25 each, a cost he hates passing on to the customer.
While allowing the HiFi-philes of Lexington to continue listening to their vinyl pays the bills, Terry says his true love is working on radios. Not the ones with clocks currently resting on American's nightstands, but the ones Americans used to gather around before video killed the radio star.
"I always liked to watch the tubes glow, something about that was kind of magic," he said. "I enjoyed the old technology I guess, I was kind of captivated by it." But Terry said the novelty of childhood has worn off. "I've long since gotten so accustomed to it. I don't even think about it now, which is sad, very unfortunate. I'm around it all the time and don't even give it much of a thought."
Though no longer as mesmerized by the inner workings of old-time radios, Terry knows them inside and out and easily goes into great detail on the condition of the radios on his workbench and their maintenance history. He's seen and worked on enough sets to know the ones that did not have a McGuyver-esque owner trying to forge makeshift repairs will be easier for him to bring back to their original majesty; others will take a while longer.
Even though Terry is often up to his elbows working on the mechanics of a radio, he also works on what made these icons of a time gone by truly distinctive, their cabinets. Whether just touching up a few rough spots or a complete overhaul of the radio's outer shell by replacing all of its veneer or re-staining it all, Terry is up to the challenge.
He's been asked to do minor work and bring radios back from the brink, including one that had sat in a garage in Terry's hometown of Columbus, Ohio, for the better part of two decades before arriving at his store partially covered in motor oil, and lawn clippings.
"Pretty much any radio can be made to operate and work again," he said.