Craig Recorders
Talton R. Craig (1899 - 1952) founded a company called Craig Movie Supply Company and a company called Craig - Panorama. Talton Craig became a distributor for Califone, Robert G. Metzner's company founded in 1947. Robert Craig was a co-founder of Roberts Recorders. After Rheem bought out Roberts Recorders, Robert Craig concentrated on developing Craig tape recorders and automotive tape players.
From www.radiomuseum.org
Located in Los Angeles, California and originally founded in the 30's as Craig - Panorama by Robert Craig to distribute photographic products.
In 1952 his son, the economist T. Robert Craig Jr., took over as chairman of the company and quickly transformed the business into an importer and distributor of Brown Goods, although in the late fifties and 60's the company did some of their own design, quality control and final assembly but this was mainly to get around the very stringent USA import tax regulations at the time and by 1972 the company had ceased all local assembly.
In 1963 the company changed from a California registered company into the Delaware registered Craig Corp.
Although the company traded in all kinds of CE products ranging from alarm clocks through calculators (very high tech at the time) the company's became best know in the 60's for their tape recorder products that they sourced from Sanyo, Pioneer and others, initially these were mostly Reel to Reel but the company expanded into the 8 Track Cartridge market in the latter half of the decade and met with spectacular success in the ten emerging car audio market, the end result being that in last 2 decades of the company's life it was mostly known as a provider of car audio products and novelty high tech electronics.
The company had for a time very close ties to Pioneer and when Pioneer USA was set up in 1972 a number of top Craig employees left to work for that company. The company's assets including the brandname were sold to Bercor in 1985.
Craig, Corp Ads
992 Craig Residence "Peppergate Ranch" - Built in 1939 and located in West Hills, this one-story single-family residence was designed by master architect Paul Revere Williams (1894-1980) in the Ranch Style. One of the foremost architects of Los Angeles in the mid-twentieth century, Williams was the first certified African-American architect west of the Mississippi River, the first African-American member of the American Institute of Architects, and also served on the first Los Angeles Planning Commission. The residence was built for Talton R. Craig, founder of the Craig Movie Supply Company. The home was built as the primary residence of Craig’s 29-acre ―Peppergate Ranch,‖ later subdivided in the 1960s as Woodlake Estates and Pinelake Estates. (Description from: City of Los Angeles - Office of Historic Resources)
The non-profit Museum was dissolved on December 31, 2017. Donations are NOT tax deductible and are now processed by Phantom Productions.
All donations to MOMSR go 100% to support restoration of vintage magnetic recording devices in the private collection and help fund the web site development and hosting.
