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In my late teens, I finally asked him about it. He told me that he had talked my mother into letting him buy this thing in kit form, build it, and then install the very best speaker components of the day. He said he had had paid top dollar for the cabinet kit, and the speakers that were specified for that cabinet were also quite expensive.
I asked why it was unfinished, and he said that a few weeks short of his completion of the cabinet in the late 1950s, "They invented Stereo," and he couldn't talk my mother into letting him buy another cabinet kit and the speakers to install in it.
He added that he'd thought about it for awhile, and that since the first kit took an awful lot of work and was "a real pain in the <posterior>" with all of its details, he had decided to just let it go to bad timing.
A few years later, good speakers became available in pairs at much more affordable prices because of competition in the new Stereo "Hi-Fi" market and economies of scale.
Jim
