*WARNING*
Long, probably pointless, post follows. Read further on your own responsibility. Your time cannot be refunded.
Magic eye tubes have a significance for me. At a long-ago garage sale, I scored a Fisher tuner/preamp. It was many pounds of mid-50s all-American luxury, complete with deluxe plastic knobs and of course the magic eye to help home in on your FM station with jet-age precision. And it worked! Used to run it into the power amp every so often just for fun. Sounded wonderfully tubey - like martinis and tiki torches and Deano, or maybe I'm just being nostalgic.
Back then I was a newspaper reporter. Got assigned to profile a local who'd donated some fantastically significant piece of electronica to the Smithsonian Institution and been awarded a Certificate of Appreciation or some such. Can't recall exactly what he provided - might have been a NOS dashboard radio for a Tucker. Or maybe that was just one of the treasures in his collection. Much of his house was an Aladdin's Cave of vintage gear. His particular passion was amateur radios, with perhaps two dozen working sets including some 1930s German units. As you might expect of a ham radio guy, he was more than a little strange. Friendly enough, even jovial. Good interview. But I don't think I would have had him look after my kids. In his library, he even had the owner's manual for my Fisher find. Later, I gifted the thing to him - figured he'd enjoy it more than me.
Months went by. Got a call to the newsroom. Someone had committed a rather spectacular suicide on one of our major commercial streets. Seems a man had laid down with his head just in front of the right rear tires of a parked semi truck. So when the driver eased away...
When me and the photog got there, all that could be seen was a blanket with two running shoe-clad feet sticking out from one end. The other end was flat where it should not have been. And no shortage of blood. Next day local law enforcement released his identity; it was that same radio collector. Guess the static in his head finally got to be too much. Or could he have spent too long staring into that unblinking magic eye tube that I'd put in his home?
Now, I wonder what happened to his collection. Could imagine his wife trashing the lot in a fit or grief and rage. Or maybe his kids have been selling it off on Ebay. Some of those pieces would be worth real money these days.
Hopefully, this tale won't discourage anyone from collecting old equipment, or reviving the magic eye tube. After all, it's the magic eye - not the evil eye.
Or is it?