A visit with Thomas Rushing is like tuning a fine radio: no matter what the station, wherever you turn the dial, you can expect intelligent conversation often laced with humor, for he’s a well-read man.

He is best, perhaps, at what he has done for a living most of his 69 years – repair radios and TVs. Last Nov. 4, he reached the 50-year milestone of being in the repair business, but his career began much earlier than that, for at the age of about 12 he was working with his father and brothers in his dad’s radio repair shop in Tylertown.

“We just grew up in radio,” he said. By the time he was 13, he could take a diagram and build a radio, and if he wanted an amplifier for a record player, he could build that, too.

“All the Rushing boys could do it. We learned from our daddy in the shop,” he said. Thomas is the third of six boys – the others are Sonny, Kenneth, Joe Dan, Emmett and Greg. He also has three sisters – Melanie, June and Elaine.

Born in Tylertown July 3, 1939, Thomas Rushing’s first job was sacking groceries at age 11. By the time he was 13, he was working at a theater with his two older brothers.

“We popped corn, sold tickets, swept floors, whatever,” he said. He also learned to run a 35 mm projector at the theater and the 16 mm used at the school.

All work and no play would have made a dull boy, but Rushing admits to his share of mischief. He told of the time he put a fake spider in the cash register – and money went in all directions when the lady in charge pulled out the drawer. Another time, he fell off his bicycle on a slippery street, and he laughs about the lady who called his mother and said, “Thomas either broke his arm or bent it mighty bad.”

His parents moved to Vicksburg on Thanksgiving 1954; but Thomas stayed in Tylertown with his brother Sonny until school was out. Sonny had a repair shop, and Thomas continued working with him until he joined his parents in Vicksburg, entering Carr Central High School when he was in the 10th grade. Within a year, he had a job making TV repairs for the Thomas Company.

Carr Central had a program of diversified occupation, and Rusing enrolled. He attended school for several hours each day and then went to work at the Thomas Company. About six o’clock, he caught the bus to the end of Clay Street where he ran the projector at the Revoli Drive-In Theater, then walked back to the family home next to Farris Food Store across from the old Brothers’ school.

“I was lucky to have a close-knit family,” he said. His father was a Primitive Baptist minister, “extremely knowledgeable about the Bible,” who preached and pastored without salary, but “he was as close as you could get to being an electrical engineer without having a degree.”

Elder Elisha Rushing’s interest in all things electrical, which he passed on to his boys, came about during the depression when he moved to New Orleans in search of work. While operating a streetcar, he became friends with an old man who was a retired electrical engineer, and he told his friend he wanted to learn from him “all I can absorb” about electricity and about radios, which were relatively new in most American homes. A heart attack made it necessary for him to return to Tylertown where he opened a repair shop in his home in the late 1930s or early ’40s.

“During World War II, when you couldn’t get parts, he let us kids take tubes and parts out of junked radios, put them in boxes and save them,” Rushing said. “We learned what all the components were, and we played around with them.” Sonny was repairing radios when he was in high school, and by the time TV came along Thomas was old enough to help him put up antennas.

Always inquisitive, Thomas would ask his father how something worked, and he said, “Daddy would sit down and draw a diagram and say, ‘No, son, this is how it works.’ I got an education from him. It was just like going to school.”

In the early days of radio, Rushing said, most stations were AM – there were only a few FMs – and even-numbered stations such as WWL in New Orleans and WSM in Nashville were so powerful their clear channels reached for hundreds of miles. One station, XERF in Del Rio, Texas, had even more power, for its tower was across the border in Mexico and it was free from government restrictions.

“I remember one girl who used to sing on the radio all the time,” Rushing said, and he figured “her daddy must have owned the station” because her voice was so bad.

Short wave sets were also popular, especially during World War II, and Zenith made a Transoceanic radio which was the most popular. Listeners could pick up South American stations and some in Europe.

“A lot of those radios were set on WMV, which gave the time on the hour and half hour, announcing it with ‘On the tone the time will be exactly’ such and such,” Rushing said.

Radio manufacturing and repair have taken drastic turns. The big names of the past – Atwater Kent, Philco, Crosley, Zenith, RCA – no longer exist, and Rushing says he knows of no radios being made in America.

You can still get parts for the old sets, but time and cost would make it prohibitive unless it was a hobby. Rushing has restored a 1936 Crosley, and Sonny reworked a 1925 Atwater Kent whose tubes were still good. In the 1960s, radio manufacturers switched to printed circuits and TVs began to change to solid state. By 1975, TV sets no longer had picture tubes.

“Quasar was one of the first to make what they called ‘works in a drawer,'” Rushing said. “All you did was pull the drawer out, unplug the board, and put in a new one.”

When TVs first became available in the late 1940s – though they had been around for decades but just weren’t practical – there were only a few stations one might pick up with a Vicksburg set. They were in New Orleans and Memphis, and Rushing recalls putting up “many of those 100-foot-tall-or-more antennas. I wonder how I got through all that without getting killed.”

“They’re using plug-in boards again,” he said, “because new sets are so sophisticated. We’re right back where we were, in another cycle.” He recently repaired one set that had to have a new screen which cost $1,000, and another had to have a new board that cost $800.

“Once a set is out of warranty, it costs a fortune to repair it,” he said. “People are often just as well off to buy a new set and junk the old one. We have become a throw-away society.”

Though work has changed in the last few years, he says he still does a lot of fixing at his shop. He quit making house calls long ago. He does all the work for the casinos and most local hotels.

Rushing’s business, Red Carpet TV Service, is the only one in Vicksburg, and though the name Rushing has been synonymous with radio and TV repair for generations, none of the younger family members are interested.

Thomas Rushing is the only one left in the business, so he says, “I reckon I’m it.”

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Gordon Cotton is an author and historian who lives in Vicksburg.