1958. A 72-year-old man lies in a Chicago hospital bed. His body failing, but his mind still sharp enough to understand what he’s leaving behind. Commander Eugene F. Macdonald Jr. The swaggering Navy veteran who drove a car up the steps of the General Logan Memorial just to get arrested for the publicity. The Arctic explorer who broadcast Eskimos singing into microphones from Greenland. The showman who built an electronics empire from a kitchen table. takes his last breath. Outside the hospital windows, his factories stretch across Chicago’s west side like a monument to American industrial ambition.
11,000 workers punch their time cards each morning at seven different plants. The Zenith name glows from television sets in 20 million American living rooms. The quality goes in before the name goes on. They believe it and so does America. 40 years later, those same factories stand empty. The windows are shattered. Teenagers set fires in the hallways where engineers once perfected the technology that would become the standard for highdefinition television. The last 1,200 workers have collected their final paychecks.
The company that invented the wireless remote control that pioneered subscription television that created the transmission system America would use to broadcast every Super Bowl and presidential address in the digital age. That company is being sold to South Korea for the price of its debts. Commander Macdonald built something that changed how America lived and then America watched it disappear. Was this the inevitable price of progress? Or did someone choose to let it die? Did your family have a Zenith in the living room growing up?
Maybe you still remember the model or the click of that remote or the set your parents kept for decades because it just wouldn’t quit. Share it in the comments. Now, let’s begin. Chicago in 1918 was a city of smoke stacks and stockyards, of immigrant laborers and ambitious entrepreneurs, of fortunes made and lost in the space of a single generation. The Great War was drawing to a close in Europe. American soldiers were dying in French trenches to make the world safe for democracy.
And in a small apartment on the south side, two young men with a passion for wireless telegraphy were about to start something that would outlast empires. The story of Zenith begins at a kitchen table. Two ham radio operators named Carl Hassel and Ralph Matthews had been tinkering with wireless equipment in their spare time, selling homemade radio gear to fellow enthusiasts under the name Chicago radio laboratory. They operated an amateur station with the call letters 9 ZN and from that designation they would derive a name that would become synonymous with American quality for the next eight decades.
They called their first product Zeppnith. Later, they would simplify it to Zenith. The two young men had technical skills, but no money and no business sense. What they did have was a license from Edwin Armstrong, the pioneering radio inventor whose patents controlled much of the emerging radio technology. That license was valuable, and it caught the attention of a 35-year-old automobile salesman and former naval intelligence officer who had recently heard his first radio broadcast. and recognized immediately that there was money to be made.
Eugene Francis Macdonald Jr. was born in Syracuse, New York in 1886. The son of a storekeeper who struggled to keep his family afloat. School didn’t interest young Eugene. At 14, he dropped out to take a factory job with the Franklin Automobile Company. By 1904, he had moved to Chicago, where he became an automobile salesman with a gift for publicity stunts. He once drove a car up the steps of the General John Logan Memorial in Grant Park with a photographer present and a policeman there to arrest him.
He paid the policeman $10 for the arrest. The photograph ran in newspapers across the city. When America entered World War I in 1917, Macdonald enlisted in the Naval Intelligence Service. His commission came about because he understood the operation of a device called the telegraph phone used by the Navy for recording telephone conversations and the manufacturer had gone out of business leaving Macdonald as one of the few people who could operate and maintain the equipment. He rose to the rank of Lieutenant Commander before his discharge in 1919.
Though he continued in the Naval Reserve until 1939, he would insist on being called commander for the rest of his life. In 1921, Macdonald learned about Hazel and Matthews and their Armstrong license. He invested his savings and joined the partnership as general manager. Two years later, in 1923, the three men incorporated the Zenith Radio Corporation. 30,000 shares of stock were issued at $10 per share with the URI largest block going to McDonald. He was 37 years old and he was about to build an empire.
The partnership was strengthened that same year by the addition of Hugh Robertson, a financial expert who joined as treasurer. If Macdonald was the vision and the showmanship, Robertson was the discipline and the careful planning, together they would navigate Zenith through challenges that destroyed most of their competitors. Macdonald understood instinctively that in a market crowded with dozens of radio manufacturers, technical superiority alone would not guarantee success. He needed to make Zenith famous. And so he turned himself into a character, an adventurer, a living advertisement for the power and reliability of his products.
In 1923, Macdonald became the first president of the National Association of Broadcasters. That same year, he persuaded Admiral Donald McMillan to take a Zenith shortwave radio on his Arctic expedition. McMillan’s transmissions from the frozen north proved to be dramatic demonstrations of shortwave communications efficiency and Zenith’s advertising made certain that every American newspaper reader knew which company had made it possible. In 1925, Macdonald helped organize another McMillan expedition, this time to the North Pole itself. Macdonald joined as a ship commander, though he went only as far as Greenland.
From there, he made shortwave radio broadcasts of Eskimos singing into his microphone. The broadcasts were sensations. Zenith’s advertising always reminded the public that their shortwave radios were the choice of Arctic explorers. Meanwhile, Zenith’s engineers were developing products that backed up the marketing with genuine innovation. In 1924, Zenith introduced the world’s first portable radio. In 1926, they produced the first home radio receiver that could operate on household current rather than batteries. In 1927, they pioneered push button tuning, eliminating the need for listeners to carefully adjust dials to find their stations.
That same year, the company adopted the slogan that would define it for the next 70 years. The quality goes in before the name goes on. By 1927, Zenith was large enough to secure its own manufacturing license from RCA, freeing the company from dependence on outside patent holders. The employees, sensing they were part of something special, accepted McDonald’s demanding leadership because they shared in the company’s success. Zenith’s profit sharing plans were among the most generous in American industry.
The company’s growth in the 1920s was remarkable. From a kitchen table operation with perhaps a few thousand dollars in capital, Zenith had grown into a publicly traded corporation with factories, employees, and products shipping across the country. The radio boom of the 1920s created dozens of competitors, many of them well financed and eager to capture market share. But Zenith under McDonald’s leadership consistently outmaneuvered them. In an era when radio manufacturers competed largely on technical specifications that most consumers couldn’t understand, McDonald created a personality for Zenith.
The company wasn’t just selling radios. It was selling adventure, exploration, the romance of hearing voices from around the world. The Arctic Expeditions positioned Zenith as the company for people who dreamed of distant places. But Macdonald also understood that showmanship without substance would eventually collapse. He insisted on engineering excellence. The portable radio of 1924, the AC powered radio of 1926, the pushb button tuning of 1927. Each of these innovations addressed real consumer frustrations. And the profit sharing plans created loyalty that would prove crucial during the depression years ahead.
When the stock market crashed in October 1929 and the Great Depression descended on America, the radio industry was thrown into chaos. Dozens of companies that had sprung up during the radio boom of the 1920s vanished into bankruptcy. Zenith’s sales collapsed from $10 million in 1929 to less than $2 million in 1932. The company suffered five consecutive years of losses, but Zenith survived. Hugh Robertson’s careful financial management meant the company had no debt when the crash came. Unlike competitors who had borrowed heavily to finance expansion, Zenith could weather the storm without borrowing a penny.
And McDonald’s workforce accepted pay cuts and longer hours to keep the company alive. The profit sharing culture now paid dividends in loyalty. Macdonald never stopped scheming. In 1934, he sent a telegram to every oil and tire company in America. watch absence of people on streets between 11 and 11:30 during presidential talk after President Roosevelt’s fireside chat ended. Macdonald followed up with letters urging them to become Zenith auto radio dealers. One of his most popular ideas during the 1930s was the big black dial for radios with large clock style numbers or designed to be read from a distance or without glasses.
By 1936, Zenith was profitable again. Net sales of $8.5 million produced net income of $1.2 million. By 1937, sales had climbed to nearly $17 million with profits approaching $2 million. The company had outgrown its original facilities on Iron Street and relocated to a new 400,000 ft plant at 61 West Dickens Avenue. This complex would be expanded repeatedly over the coming decades, eventually sprawling across four city blocks. By 1941, Zenith had risen to second place in a $600 million radio industry behind only the mighty RCA.
The company that had started at a kitchen table now employed thousands of workers and shipped products around the world. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941, Zenith’s transition to wartime production was already underway. The company’s engineers, who had spent years perfecting consumer radios, now applied their expertise to radar systems, military communications equipment, and precision instruments for the armed forces. Net sales climbed from $23.8 million in 1941 to $34.2 million in 1942. The war years transformed Zenith’s manufacturing capabilities.
The company expanded its facilities, trained thousands of new workers, many of them women, entering the industrial workforce for the first time, and mastered techniques of mass production that would serve it well in the postwar consumer boom. By 1943, virtually all of Zenith’s production capacity was devoted to military contracts. But Macdonald never lost sight of the postwar future. Even as his factories produced radar equipment, Zanith continued to advertise to civilians, keeping the brand visible for the day when consumer production would resume.
In a war run by radar and radio, a 1944 employment advertisement proclaimed, “Hasten victory. Help manufacture vital war equipment, temporary, duration, or permanent jobs, real postwar opportunity.” McDonald’s perfectionism extended to every product. Zenith made, but nothing obsessed him more than creating the perfect portable radio. He was a yachtsman whose vessel, the Mispaw, was one of the largest private yachts on the Great Lakes. Aboard that yacht, he experienced the frustration of poor radio reception firsthand. Standard AM broadcasts faded to static beyond a few hundred miles from shore.
What Macdonald wanted was a portable radio that could receive not only standard broadcasts but also shortwave signals. The highfrequency transmissions that bounced off the ionosphere and could travel around the world. The technical obstacles were formidable. Vacuum tubes in the 1930s and 1940s had difficulty operating at higher frequencies using the lower voltages that batteryp powered designs required. Macdonald rejected prototype after prototype, personally testing each one on his yacht during voyages. His engineers, Gustafson, Paso, Striker, and MDA, worked for years to meet his specifications.
In late 1941, they finally succeeded with the model 7G605, which Maccdonald christened the Clipper. It was the world’s first totally portable multiband radio designed for both standard and shortwave broadcast listening. Zenith advertised it extensively, loaning or giving sets to celebrities. Production began in 1942, but America’s entry into World War II halted consumer manufacturing. The Clippers that had been produced went to the war effort instead. After the war ended, Zenith resumed production of the portable multiband radio, now called the Trans Oceanic.
It became legendary among radio enthusiasts and world travelers, remaining in production until 1981. a remarkable 39-year run. Many collectors consider it the best designed mass-produced portable radio ever made. In December 1957, Macdonald and his engineers achieved another milestone, the Royal 1000, the world’s first portable transistorized multiband radio. The old man, now 71, supervised the project personally. It would be his last major involvement with product development. Macdonald had been watching television since before most Americans had ever seen a TV set.
Zenith began television development as early as 1939 and started experimental broadcasts that year. But Macdonald was skeptical of commercial television’s business model. He believed that viewers would not tolerate commercials and was convinced that sooner or later commercial television would collapse under its own contradictions. His solution was subscription television. Zenith launched Phone Vision, an experimental system using Chicago station KS2XBS that required a descrambler box connected to telephone lines. When a viewer wanted to watch a pay program, they would call a Zenith operator who would send a signal to unscramble the video.
It was clunky and decades ahead of its time, but it was the ancestor of HBO, cable television, and every streaming service that would eventually dominate entertainment. Despite his doubts about commercial TV, Macdonald understood that Zenith could not ignore the market. The company sold its first television sets to the public in 1948. And it was in television that McDonald’s obsession with quality would create both Zenith’s greatest triumphs and plant the seeds of its eventual destruction. In the early 1950s, manufacturers like RCA and General Electric began switching from handwired chassis to printed circuit boards.
Circuit boards saved time and reduced assembly errors, but they were not well suited for vacuum tube equipment, which generated high temperatures that could break down the boards over time. Zenith, under McDonald’s direction, continued to use handwired chassis in all vacuum tube equipment. Every connection was made by skilled workers who soldered wires by hand. It was more expensive, it was slower, and it produced the most reliable television sets in America. McDonald’s engineers also developed innovations that would define the industry.
In 1950, Zenith introduced the Lazy Bones, the first television remote control. It used a cable that ran from the TV set to the viewer’s chair. Customers liked the convenience, but complained about the unsightly wire running across their living room floors. Macdonald ordered his engineers to develop a wireless version. They tried radio waves first, but interference from other radio sources made the system unreliable. Then in 1955, engineer Eugene Pauly invented the flashmatic, which used a directional flashlight beam aimed at photosensitive receivers in the corners of the television cabinet.
But bright sunlight could accidentally activate the controls, changing channels at random. In 1956, Zenith introduced the space command. Engineer Robert Adler had suggested using ultrasonic sound waves instead of light or radio. The handheld remote contains small aluminum rods that produce different high-pitch tones when pressed. The television’s built-in microphone detected these tones and responded accordingly. At $259.95, equivalent to over $2,800 today, it was truly a luxury item, but it worked. The space command represented everything that made Zenith special.
It was innovative. No other company had developed a practical wireless remote. It was elegant. The aluminum rods produced a distinctive, almost musical click that gave the device its colloquial name, the clicker, and it was built to last. Space Command remotes from the 1950s still function perfectly today, more than six decades later. The space command remained in production until the early 1980s when infrared technology replaced ultrasonics. More than 9 million ultrasonic remote control TVs were sold during the 25- year reign of Adler’s invention.
For their pioneering work, Adler and Pi jointly received an Emmy from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in 1997. Both men spent their entire careers at Zenith, embodying the company’s commitment to long-term research and employee loyalty. On May 15th, 1958, Commander Eugene F. Macdonald Jr. died in Chicago at the age of 72. He had built Zenith from a kitchen table operation into one of the two largest television manufacturers in America alongside RCA. His unexpected death, observers noted, left a void of talent at the top that the company would struggle to fill.
In 1967, Macdonald was postumously inducted into the broadcast pioneers hall of fame. His body was interred in the McDonald family crypt at Queen of Heaven Catholic Cemetery in Hillside, Illinois, just a few miles from the factories where thousands of workers still assembled radios and televisions bearing the name he had made famous. But even as they mourn their founder, Zenith’s workers continued to build products that embodied his vision of American quality. By 1960, Zenith and RCA stood as the two dominant forces in American television manufacturing, each controlling more than 20% of the market.
25 other companies split the rest. The 1962 Illinois manufacturers directory captured Zenith at its zenith. The company employed 11,000 workers across seven Chicago area plants. Plant number one at 601 West Dickens Avenue housed 2500 workers making radio and television sets and hi-fi stereoponic photographs. Plant number two at 1500 North Ker Avenue employed 2,100 workers making government electronics, radio and television components, transistors, and hearing aids. plant number three at 5,8001. West Dickens employed 300 workers in electronics and servicing.
The company had also expanded through subsidiaries. The Roland Corporation at 4,245 North Knox Avenue employed 850 workers producing television picture tubes. In 1966, Rand purchased the former Keebler cookie plant in Melrose Park, Illinois, and converted it for color CRT production. The Melrose Park facility would eventually become the last Zenith manufacturing plant on American soil. Throughout the 1960s, Zenith engineers continued to innovate. They developed the industry’s first 21in three electron gun rectangular color picture tube in 1954, pioneering the color television technology that would transform American entertainment.
In 1969, they introduced the revolutionary chromacolor black matrix picture tube, which doubled image brightness and established a new performance standard for the entire industry. Even as they embraced the solid state era, Zenith maintained McDonald’s quality obsession. They kept circuit boards out of their televisions until the chromacolor line of the early 1970s and even then used them only with solidstate components, mounting the remaining vacuum tubes on steel chassis. Their system 3 modular TV chassis introduced in 1978 represented the last major update to their analog television line.
The quality was real. Zenith televisions routinely outlasted competitors products by years. Service technicians across America knew that a Zenith would give them fewer headaches than any other brand. The company’s commitment to quality extended beyond the products themselves to the workers who made them. Many Zenith employees spent their entire careers at the company, passing through multiple plants and departments as they accumulated skills and seniority. Fathers worked alongside sons. Whole families organized their lives around the rhythms of Zanith’s shift changes.
The plants themselves were more than workplaces. They were communities. Workers ate lunch together in company cafeterias, socialized at company sponsored events, and celebrated milestones with colleagues who had become friends. The 1962 employment numbers tell only part of the story. Beyond the 11,000 workers directly employed by Zenith in the Chicago area, thousands more worked for suppliers and subcontractors. The Zenith economy rippled through the entire West Side. But quality costs money. And in the early 1970s, a new kind of competition began to arrive on American shores.
The first signs of trouble appeared in the form of container ships unloading televisions at American ports. Japanese manufacturers Sony, Matsushita, Toshiba, Hitachi, Sharp, Sano had rebuilt their industries after World War II with modern factories and lower labor costs. Now they were exporting aggressively to the American market. By 1970, the math was becoming impossible. American workers earned American wages. American factories paid American utility rates. American property taxes. American regulatory compliance costs. Japanese televisions arrived on American shelves priced below what it cost Zenith to manufacture the same products.
In December 1970, National Union Electric, the corporate successor to Emerson Radio, filed suit against most of the major Japanese television manufacturers. NUE alleged that the Japanese companies had violated the Anti-Dumping Act of 1916 and conspired to destroy the American consumer electronics industry by selling televisions at artificially depressed prices. Zenith watched NUE’s case develop while its own market share eroded year after year. By 1974, the company could no longer remain a spectator. Zenith joined NUE’s lawsuit along with Sears, Robbuck, and Company, and Motorola as co-plaintiffs.
The consolidated case sought $900 million in damages. The lawsuit became one of the most complex antirust cases in American history. The plaintiffs alleged a unitary conspiracy with both home market and export components aimed at affecting a complete takeover of the US consumer electronics market. John Nevin, who became Zenith’s chairman during this period, testified before Congress and publicly accused the Japanese of dumping goods on the American market at below prices. But the courts proved hostile to Zenith’s arguments.
In 1981, the trial court granted summary judgment to the defendants. The plaintiffs appealed. In March 1986, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in favor of the Japanese manufacturers on Zenith’s antirust claims. The court reasoned that the alleged conspiracy made no economic sense. Why would rational companies sustain decades of losses in hopes of eventually dominating a market they might never control? Zenith’s last hope rested on claims under the 1916 Anti-Dumping Act. In April 1987, the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal from a lower court ruling that had sided with the Japanese, the case that Zenith had spent millions of dollars litigating over more than a decade.
ended with nothing. The failure of the antitrust lawsuit devastated Zenith’s management. They had believed that the American legal system would protect American companies from what they saw as unfair foreign competition. When the Supreme Court ruled against them, it wasn’t just a legal defeat. It was a repudiation of their entire understanding of how the American economy was supposed to work. The ruling in Matsushida Electric Industrial Company versus Zenith Radio Corporation would become a landmark in antitrust law. Legal scholars debated its implications for decades.
None of that mattered to the Zenith workers who were losing their jobs. The casualties mounted yearbyear. In 1974, Motorola sold its Quazar television division to Matsushita Electric Industrial. A Motorola spokesman explained, “We were in several businesses that required a lot of capital, and our strategy indicated that our future in semiconductors and two-way radio was better than consumer electronics. RCA, Zenith’s great rival, redirected its research toward speculative projects and lost its edge in color television. The company would be acquired by General Electric in 1986 with GE eventually selling the RCA consumer electronics business to Thompson of France.
Admiral Filco, Duant, Magnavox, one by one, the great names of American television manufacturing either disappeared or were absorbed by foreign owners. Zenith’s then chairman, John Nevin, watched his competitors fall and understood that his company could not survive on domestic production alone. In 1977, Zenith opened its first non US production facilities in Mammoros, Mexico, and in Taiwan. By 1978, the company had laid off 25% of its American workforce. The elimination of McDonald’s legendary profit sharing plans followed soon after.
In 1977, Zenith habbed its research and development staff, laying off approximately 200 engineers. It was a decision driven by short-term financial pressure, but its consequences would compound for decades. The engineers who left took their institutional knowledge with them. That same year, Zenith contracted with Japan’s Sony Corporation to market Sony’s Betamax home video television recorder in the United States under the Zenith label. The irony was painful. The proudly American company was now reselling Japanese technology to American consumers.
The workforce reductions continued throughout the late 1970s. Workers who had expected to spend their entire careers at Zenith found themselves collecting unemployment checks, retraining for new industries or moving to other cities in search of work. The Chicago neighborhoods where Zenith workers lived felt the effects gradually. restaurants seeing smaller lunch crowds, houses staying on the market longer, families struggling in ways they hadn’t before. By the early 1980s, Zenith was the last American television manufacturer still standing. Every major competitor had either folded, been acquired by foreign companies, or exited the consumer electronics business entirely.
In 1982, Zenith suffered a net loss of $24 million and failed to pay a dividend for the first time in nearly 50 years. The unbroken string of payments that had rewarded shareholders through the depression, through World War II, through every previous crisis was finally severed. That same year, Zenith made its last radio. The company that had introduced the world’s first portable radio in 1924 that had created the legendary Trans Oceanic quietly exited the business it had helped create.
In 1984, the company changed its name from Zenith Radio Corporation to Zenith Electronics Corporation. The word radio, the word that connected the company to its founders and their hamst was officially erased from its identity. But there were still reasons for hope. Jerry Pearlman, a senior Zenith Finance executive who would later become chairman, had pushed the company into the personal computer market in 1979. Zenith acquired the Heath company for 64.5 million. The shrewd purchase occurred just after Heath announced its first personal computer kit.
Zenith Data Systems, the wholly owned subsidiary that grew from the Heath acquisition, became one of the most successful computer manufacturers of the 1980s. The first Zenith computer, the Zed 100, was introduced in 1981 and 35,000 units shipped in its first year. By the late 1980s, Zenith Data Systems had become a billiondoll operation. The success of Zenith Data Systems created its own tensions within the company. Computer executives argued that television was a dying business. Television executives countered that computers were a fad.
The debate consumed management attention that might have been better spent addressing competitive challenges in both markets. As the 1980s drew to a close, a new technology promised to save Zenith’s television business, highdefin television. HDTV offered images with resolution far beyond anything standard analog television could produce. The US government fearing that Japanese manufacturers would completely dominate the next generation of television technology encouraged American companies to develop competing systems. Zenith threw itself into the race with a desperation born of corporate survival.
In 1989, the company partnered with AT&T to develop a digital HDTV transmission system. AT&T Bell Laboratories would develop video compression technology while AT&T micro electronics would develop the necessary semiconductors. Zenith would contribute its expertise in transmission systems. The partnership proved extraordinarily successful technically. Zenith developed a transmission method called VSB, vestigial sideband that could deliver HDTV signals while minimizing interference with existing analog broadcasts. In early 1994, the Grand Alliance, the industry consortium developing the American HDTV standard, selected Zenith’s VSB technology as the terrestrial broadcast and cable transmission system.
In December 1996, the Federal Communications Commission adopted Zenith’s digital transmission technology as the centerpiece of the ATS Hy digital television broadcast standard. Every HTDV broadcast in America would use technology that Zenith had invented. In 1997, Zenith and other members of the Grand Alliance received a technical Emmy for their pioneering developments. It was a triumph of American engineering. Zenith, the company that Japanese competition had nearly destroyed, had created the technology that would define television for the next century.
There was just one problem. Zenith couldn’t afford to wait for HDTV to become profitable. The company had won the technological race, but lost the financial marathon. The years of development had consumed resources that Zenith simply didn’t have. The computer division’s profits had been sold to Group Bull. The television division continued to bleed money. The HD TV technology that was supposed to be Zenith’s salvation existed in laboratories and test broadcasts, but commercial products were still years away. To fund its HD TV research and reduce crushing debt, Zenith sold its computer business to Paris-based Group Bull in October 1989 for $511 million, later increased to $635 million.
Zenith Data Systems, the only part of the company that was consistently profitable, was gone. Starting in 1989, Zenith posted five consecutive years of heavy losses. The smallest was $52 million in 1991. The largest was $16 million in 1992. Year after year, depressed prices for televisions driven by relentless Asian competition overwhelmed every attempt at cost reduction. By 1990, Zenith was in serious trouble and increasingly vulnerable to hostile takeover. To avoid being swallowed by a competitor, the company sold a 5% stake to the Korean company Gold Star, later renamed LG Electronics, as part of a technology sharing agreement.
It was a defensive measure designed to provide stability while Zenith waited for HDTV to arrive. On October 29th, 1991, Zenith announced what many had long feared. The company would close its television assembly operations in Springfield, Missouri, and move them to Mexico. The Springfield plant employed 1,500 workers who had believed they were building careers, not just making televisions. The announcement came like a physical blow. Workers who had given years or decades to the company, gathered in small groups, some weeping, others stunned into silence.
The plant had been the economic anchor of Springfield’s workingclass neighborhoods. Zenith spokesman John Taylor tried to soften the message. Research and development and production of major components like picture tubes would remain in the United States, he promised. But everyone understood what the move really meant. The company that had employed 11,000 workers across seven Chicago area plants in 1962 was retreating to Mexico, where wages were a fraction of American levels. In late 1996, Zenith announced the layoff of 25% of its remaining US workforce, approximately 1,175 workers.
The company indefinitely postponed construction of a $100 million large screen picture tube plant in Woodridge, Illinois that had been intended to position Zenith for the HD TV era. On July 17th, 1995, Zenith’s board of directors gathered to approve a transaction that marked the effective end of American television manufacturing. LG Electronics would purchase an additional stake for $351 million, raising its ownership to approximately 58%, enough to assume controlling interest. The headlines told the real story. Korean firm buying Zenith, the last US TV maker.
After nearly eight decades, the American television manufacturing industry was no longer Americanowned. The LG investment bought Zenith Time, but it couldn’t buy Salvation. The company posted losses of $92.4 million in 1995, $178 million in 1996, and $299.4 million in 1997. Each year, the hemorrhage grew worse. CEO Al Mosner resigned abruptly in July 1996, overwhelmed by the scale of the crisis. His replacement, if Peter Wilmott, announced the wave of layoffs, but resigned after only 10 months on the job.
Jeffrey Ganon, a 24-year veteran of General Electric, arrived in January 1998, just in time to oversee the final collapse. In late 1998, Zenith closed the Melrose Park picture tube plant, its last manufacturing facility on American soil. 2,000 workers received their final paychecks. The complex that had produced millions of picture tubes that had been the heart of Zenith’s color television manufacturing since the 1960s fell silent. The losses continued, $275.5 million in 1998 on sales of just $984.8 8 million.
The company that had once recorded annual revenues in the billions was collapsing in on itself. The HD TV sets that Zenith finally began shipping in August 1999, 64-in widescreen rear projection models, represented the culmination of a decade of development. They were technologically impressive, but they were too expensive for most consumers, and there was almost no HD TV content to watch on them. By September 1999, only 70 digital television stations were on the air in the entire country.
In August 1999, Zenith filed a prepackaged bankruptcy plan with the support of its creditors and LG. The company emerged from bankruptcy in November of that year as a wholly owned subsidiary of LG Electronics. All existing common stock was cancelled. Shareholders who had held Zenith stock, some of them families who had owned shares since McDonald’s day, received nothing. The bankruptcy court proceedings were held in a federal courthouse in Glen View, Illinois. Zenith ceased to exist as an independent company on November 8th, 1999, 81 years after Carl Hassel and Ralph Matthews had started building radios at that kitchen table in Chicago.
What killed Zenith? The question has no single answer, and the people who live through the company’s collapse still argue about it decades later. The unionists point to management decisions that prioritize short-term profits over long-term investment. The R&D cuts of 1977 that dispersed institutional expertise. The executives point to competitive forces beyond any company’s control. Japanese manufacturers with government coordination, patient capital, and protected home markets. The economists point to comparative advantage. American workers earning American wages in a global economy where millions in Asia would do the same work for a fraction of the cost.
The truth probably combines all of these factors. Zenith’s leadership understood what was happening and chose their responses deliberately. They moved production to Mexico to cut costs. They sold profitable divisions to fund unprofitable ones. They spent millions on lawsuits instead of factories. They bet the company’s future on HDTV and won the technological race, but couldn’t survive long enough to collect the prize. What happened to the workers who lost their jobs? Some found new careers, retraining for different industries.
Some retired early, collecting reduced pensions and watching their health insurance evaporate. Some never recovered. Their working lives effectively ended in middle age. Gail Garton spent 10 years at Zanith Springfield plant, most of them on the final assembly line, building wooden cabinets for larger television sets. On November 30th, 1990, she was called to the office and told her job had been eliminated. She enrolled in a 2-year secretarial program at Missouri State University, reinventing herself for an economy that had no use for her old skills.
The ripple effects of plant closures spread through entire communities. Bars and restaurants that had served zenith workers closed. Churches lost parishioners who moved away seeking employment. Schools saw enrollment decline. The economic anchor that manufacturing had provided was simply gone. In Melrose Park, the picture tube plant that had employed thousands sat empty after 1998. The building remained standing, too polluted and too expensive to redevelop, too massive to ignore. Local aldermen complained it was an eyesore. Workers who stayed in the area would occasionally drive past and remember the pride they felt in building products that millions of Americans trusted.
The old headquarters at 601 West Dickens Avenue in Chicago’s Belmont Ken neighborhood fared even worse. The complex that had housed 2,500 workers in 1962 had been largely abandoned since the late 1990s. In the years after Zenith’s bankruptcy, the building was subdivided and rented to small businesses. By 2017, most of the complex had been vacant for years. On August 22nd, 2017, firefighters responded to a report of a vacant warehouse fire at 607 West Dickens Avenue. The Chicago Fire Department issued a 211 alarm and deployed three tower ladders.
The fire gutted a significant portion of the structure before it was struck out. Local residents told reporters that the building had been abandoned for two decades. Some remembered when their grandparents had worked there. Now it was just another dangerous ruin in a neighborhood that had seen better days. Alderman Chris Talia Faroh called for the building to be demolished. But demolition costs money and the property’s contamination complicated any attempt to repurpose the land. The neighbors learned to live with it.
They warned their children to stay away. They called the fire department when they saw smoke. The abandoned Zenith plant became simply part of the landscape. As of 2024, the Dickens Avenue complex was still standing, though barely. Drone footage showed collapsed roofs, vegetation growing through broken windows, graffiti covering every accessible surface. The water tower that had once proudly displayed the Zenith name still stood above the ruins. A monument to an industry that no longer existed. Zenith, the company, did not completely disappear.
LG Electronics maintained a subsidiary called Zenith Electronics LLC headquartered in Lincolnure, Illinois. This remnant focused on research and development, particularly the digital rights management and transmission technologies that Zenith had pioneered. Every digital television broadcast in America used Zenith’s technology. Every time a viewer watched a Super Bowl or a presidential address in high definition, they were using innovations that Zenith engineers had developed. But Zenith didn’t make the televisions that received those broadcasts. The company collected licensing fees, a few pennies per device, but it no longer built anything.
In 2000, Zenith’s profitable network systems division, which produced set top boxes for cable and satellite television, was sold to Motorola. It was the last valuable operating business that Zenith had possessed. The ghost of Zenith lingered in unexpected places. Collectors paid hundreds of dollars for vintage trans oceanic radios, marveling at the handwired construction and the quality that had made these products last for decades. Vintage Zenith televisions from the 1950s and 1960s became prized possessions for collectors of mid-century design.
They had become historical objects, testaments to a vanished industrial culture. The story of Zenith cannot be separated from the larger story of American de-industrialization. Between 1979 and 1999, manufacturing employment in the United States fell from 19 million to 17 million workers. Even as the total population grew, aimed by 50 million. The decline accelerated after 2000 with manufacturing losing another 5 million jobs by 2010. The towns and cities where those jobs had existed changed fundamentally. Flint, Michigan, Gary, Indiana, Youngstown, Ohio.
These places and hundreds like them faced populations that fell, tax bases that collapsed, infrastructure that decayed. Chicago was large and diversified enough to absorb the loss. The city’s economy shifted towards services, finance, technology. But the neighborhoods where factory workers had lived, places like Belmont Kraen, struggled to find new economic anchors. Manufacturing had provided a pathway to middle class life for workers without college degrees. A young person could graduate from high school, get a job at a factory like Zenith, and build a career that would support a family, buy a house, fund a retirement.
That pathway narrowed as manufacturing jobs disappeared, then vanished entirely in many communities. The scale of what was lost becomes clear only when you trace the networks that manufacturing supported. A single factory sustained an entire ecosystem. Tool and die makers, trucking companies, restaurants, dry cleaners, doctors, lawyers, real estate agents. When the factory closed, the economic multiplier worked in reverse. Each manufacturing job lost triggered the loss of several service jobs that had depended on it. The children of laid-off workers watched their parents struggle and drew their own conclusions.
Some resolved to get educations that would protect them from similar fates. Others absorbed a sense of fatalism, a belief that no job was truly secure, that no employer could be trusted. Today, the Zenith R&D lab still operates in Lincolnshshire, Illinois, developing transmission technologies for parent company LG Electronics. The lab contributed to the development of ATSC 3.0. zero, the next generation broadcast standard. Zenith’s legacy of innovation continues in this narrow sense. But the factories are gone. The workers have scattered.
The company that Commander McDonald built has been reduced to a handful of engineers and a portfolio of patents. If you drive through Belmont Ken today, you can still see the ruins of plant number one. The water tower stands above the wreckage. Its zenith lettering faded but still visible. The walls bear scorch marks from the 2017 fires. Photographers document the decay for websites devoted to urban exploration. The comment sections fill with memories. I worked there from 1954 to 1998.
From 1959 on in the test equipment department. Many memories. My grandmother worked at Zenith during World War II assembling radar equipment. I started working for Zenith in 1961 and was trained to be an industrial engineer at plant number three on Cosner Avenue. Down the road, plant number two fared better. It was renovated in the 2000s and 20s and converted into commercial kitchens and modern food production facilities. The building that once made televisions now makes meals. It’s a strange second life, but at least the structure stands and workers still punch time cards there.
The Melrose Park plant was eventually demolished. The land sits vacant, its future uncertain. Commander Eugene F. Macdonald Jr. lies in the family crypt at Queen of Heaven Catholic Cemetery in Hillside, Illinois. He has been dead for nearly seven decades. The company he built outlived him by 40 years before it was absorbed by its Korean competitor. What would he think if he could see what became of his creation? We cannot know. History does not allow us to interrogate the dead.
What we can know is simpler. A company existed. It employed thousands of people. It made products that Americans trusted and then it was gone. The factories are ruins. The workers have moved on or passed away. The products collect dust in antique stores and collectors basement. But somewhere in America tonight, someone will press the power button on their television remote control, that device that Eenith invented, and watch a highdefinition broadcast transmitted using technology that Zenith engineers developed. They will have no idea that the company responsible for those innovations once stood at the center of American manufacturing.
In 2008, Chicago Public Radio’s Ben Calhoun produced a documentary marking the 10th anniversary of the Melrose Park plant closure. He interviewed former Zenith employees about their time at the plant, what it meant to them, and their feelings about the decline of American manufacturing. One worker, asked to describe the experience of the final shutdown, struggled to find words adequate to the loss. It was, he finally said, a big time hurt. The remote controls that Zenith invented are in every hand.
The transmission technology that Zenith developed carries every broadcast. The innovations that Zenith pioneered live on, invisible, embedded in the infrastructure of daily life. The company is gone. The legacy remains. The quality went in before the name went on. The name is gone now, but the stories endure.
