What other people might call a museum, Jerry O’Reilly calls a hobby.

Mr. O’Reilly has been fixing, building, and collecting radios for nearly his entire life. Now, at 73 years old, he owns thousands of models, spread across three stories in a brick building in downtown Toledo. CB radios. Ham radios. Heathkit radios, which he started building as a cub scout in the 1950s.

For 50 years, he has operated a radio repair business in the city for individuals and organizations alike. He’s still in business, kind of, though he’s semi-retired. He’s also in all likelihood the only game in town when it comes to his line of work, meaning the police, the fire department, local hospitals — anyone who uses radios and scanners — comes to him when they need a tune up.

“Right now, I’m just having fun,” he said.

His shop is on the first floor of his building in downtown Toledo. The first floor is also where he keeps most of his hundreds of CB radios.

“My work benches are now shelving,” he said.

His first radio, a Heathkit model he built out of a kit in 1956, when he was about 10 years old, still sits in a small office on the second floor where he keeps all of his original projects. In that room is also his first shortwave radio, which sat on his bedside table throughout grade school and high school.

“That thing is old now,” he said.

But it, like other childhood radio projects that are still in his collection today, still looks brand new. It still sounds brand new, too.

Outside of that small office, the second and third floors hold transistor radios, table radios, Heathkit radios, Heathkit radio manuals, grandfather radios (like grandfather clocks, except instead of a clock face, it’s the speaker and dials for a radio), antique TVs (including his parents’ first TV from 1948), model planes, and his record collection.

As he navigated the stacks of electronics, he pointed out the ones he thought were particularly interesting, or ones that came with a story. That three-inch TV is from 1939. That gray radio that looks like an eyeball is from 1964. There, displayed on a shelf, is his own radio call sign: W8JOR.

“I used to go around the neighborhood and look for people who threw away radios [and] TVs,” Mr. O’Reilly said. “I fixed most of them.”

He would search through garbage and anything people left by the side of the road for any kind of electronics that he thought could be salvageable. Then, he would sell what he found and fixed at yard sales.

“Then I’d go out and buy more radios,” he said.

As a teenager, Mr. O’Reilly got a job in a TV repair shop. When he was a sophomore in high school, he told his parents that the shop’s owner was planning to sell the business. So Mr. O’Reilly’s father bought the shop for his son, and for the rest of high school, Mr. O’Reilly was a business owner.

He gave his mother payments for his father’s loan, as well as rent for the building and order forms for parts and equipment, and she handled getting the money and paperwork where it needed to go, he said. Just a few years later, by the time he was a senior, Mr. O’Reilly paid his father back everything he owed.

“They just saw my interest in it,” he said of his parents’ support.

After high school, he was drafted into the U.S. Army, he said. All draftees underwent skill testing, and he was identified as someone with abilities in working with electronics. He signed up for a job fixing radios, and that’s what he did for the two years he was in the military.

When he came home, he started his own repair business out of his parents’ house. Eventually, he said, he had to get his own place, because the radio equipment was taking up too much space.

For the next 50 years or so, he fixed radios. He’ll keep working as long as he can, and then, he said, he’ll give it up.

And as much as he’s learned about radios, he also learned from radios. Throughout school, while his teachers taught about current events, he could hear those events unfold over the airwaves.

“Especially when you’re going to school, and they’re trying to teach you world history,” he said. “You could hear it on the radio.”

First Published February 8, 2019, 5:08 p.m.