NARC 2022 Annual Meeting Recap

September 18, 2022 was a beautiful day for the NARC Annual Meeting swap meet at the Comfort Inn in Plymouth, Minnesota, and although attendance was down compared to previous years, quite a few items changed hands at bargain prices.

The meeting started off in the hotel with NARC President Phillip Drexler explaining and answering questions about the club's unfortunate and unexpected changed relationship with the Pavek Museum. The museum's mission statement has changed somewhat and there are now rental fees for holding our events there that are higher than what NARC can afford. Another problem is that the museum will no longer allow swap meets in their parking lot. So, suddenly we had to find a new location for the September annual meeting! Jim Thompson negotiated with the Comfort Inn in Plymouth, Minnesota, where we have held Radio Daze for many years, and they were happy to rent their ballroom to us for the meeting at a reasonable cost, and as noted elsewhere in this newsletter, they are also our annual radio workshop event's new location.

Next, Jim Thompson reported that everything went well with the 2022 RadioDaze event this year. We had a great program, contest, auction, and swap meet, all with no issues. Next year's meet has been scheduled with the hotel for May 19-20, 2023 and room rates are locked in at $99 per night. Greg Farmer provided election results, with all who ran for an office being elected for the upcoming club year, including Bill Fanum as the new vice-president, replacing Alan Jesperson who had held that office for many years. Greg also provided a brief financial update and reported that membership at the end of the current year was down about 40 since last year.

The meeting wrapped up with a nice Show & Tell with quite a few members showing interesting items from their collections and with prizes awarded to the six favorites. Some of these were an unusual Victor Lumiere pleated paper cone speaker in excellent condition, a 1957 Zenith Royal 750 with a gold grill, a U.S. Radio & Television model 24 cathedral radio, a 1957 Chevy retro radio, an AM/FM radio in a cooler case, an ATR DC/AC inverter that was purchased at Ax-Man Surplus, that converts 32 VDC to 110 VAC and that was manufactured by the American Television & Radio Company in St. Paul Minnesota, an Erla AC/DC radio with a wood cabinet, and a box full of transistor radios that were all the same but had different brand names on them.