Industry News Famous, Family-Owned Muntz Audio-Video Store Turns 75
» Lucille and William Kehler in front of the original store in 1938, known back then as Acme Radio.
» Roland Kehler, Bill’s son, with Earl “Madman” Muntz, in this picture from the 1960s.
It’s not often you hear about
a store — any store in any in- dustry — be in business since 1938. But that’s the case for Muntz Audio-Video of Green Bay, Wis. The real heyday for the
store was in the late 1960s and early ’70s, when most cars didn’t come equipped with factory radios. The store had about nine installers back then, said employee Jeremy Czech, and they had little room to work in. Some guys were working outside in the cold climate cutting holes in the car doors.
WHO’S WHO
“Then from this, others wanted the same for their cars, and it turned into a snowball effect. That’s what made the company what it is today. We went completely to 12 volt,” he said. Czech is part of the new
generation of employees at Muntz Audio-Video who though they can’t personally say what it was like to work there back then, they certainly are versed in the company’s rich history. The current owners are
Jim and Jenny Nackers, but Jenny’s grandfather, William
Kehler, was the first owner. He originally called the store Acme Radio and was one of the innovators of electronics in the Green Bay area, begin- ning with repairing radios in cars during the ’40s. In the ’50s and ’60s, he was repairing and selling television sets. “Bill was doing back then what we still do now — pull- ing radios out of the dash of cars,” said Jim Nackers. Car audio entered into the scene in the early ’60s, when Kehler’s work evolved into installing record players under the car dash. During this time,
Kehler’s son was working with him, and one of his friends entered the store with a car stereo called Stereo-Pak, which was a 4-track tape cartridge invented by Earl “Madmad” Muntz, one of the wildest and craziest entrepreneurs of the 20th century.
Among his other business ventures and successes, he produced “Muntz” TVs, a stripped-down-parts version of a standard TV, in the 1940s and became the first major player in the soon-to-be-huge car stereo market. In addi- tion to the 4-track, he
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