WARREN — Like other budding entrepreneurs, brothers George and Nick Calugar recognized there was a need among consumers and set out to work to meet the demand.

Their chosen profession was in television — not appearing on it, but in the sales and service side of the industry. It was a career choice that ultimately led to the formation of Central TV, and one that started with the brothers installing residential antennas out of the back of a station wagon.

“That was in the early days of TV and that would have been a little before ’51,” said George Calugar, George’s son, who now owns and operates the business on East Market Street.

“They found a need,” Calugar said. “TV was coming into its infancy and everyone needed a TV antenna, but don’t ask me how they decided that was what they wanted to start doing.”

The company this year is marking its 70th year in business.

In recent years, Central TV has seen a resurgence among consumers for antennas as a way to save money as streaming services started to grow in popularity and cable and satellite television started to grow in price.

Antennas are a way, Calugar said, for people to access local stations that might not have been available through the streaming services.

“This business, it’s been cyclical,” Calugar said. “In other words, the antenna business is back because people are tired of paying $200 to watch TV … about three to four to five years ago we were doing a lot of antenna work because more people were keeping the internet, nuking cable, nuking DIRECTV” in favor of streaming services.

So the business found itself back where it started.

BEGINNINGS

It was July 1951 when George and Nick opened their first store on East Market Street in a building they shared with a dry cleaner. It’s where Cornicelli Cleaners is located now. The business was a Zenith-authorized dealer.

Shortly after, two other brothers, Chuck and John, joined the business, but within a decade Chuck and his wife left for California, where he was in the TV repair business in San Diego until his retirement and Nick left to live and work in Florida.

Tragedy struck the business in 1965, when John had a heart attack, and then again two years later when John died from a second heart attack.

“In 1967, I was 12 years old and he (George the father) needed to keep things rolling and a gentleman by the name of Bob Cook came into the business. That was his sister’s boy,” Calugar said.

George’s father, who died this month, and Cook ran the business together until George, affectionately nicknamed “the old dude” after a customer referred to him in that manner, retired in about 1989. By then the younger George had come aboard, and took sole ownership when Cook retired in 1999.

MOVES

It was in late 2003 the business moved briefly from East Market Street to Elm Road, but the former Hinkle Home Electric building at the corner of East Market Street and Linden Avenue NE became available and Calugar moved quickly to purchase it. That meant moving twice within the span of about a year.

Space was the reason for the initial move.

“The dry cleaner needed room, we needed room. We had a bowling alley, we called it. It was 20-foot wide and 60-foot long and these TVs were getting bigger so we both needed the room,” Calugar said.

The business has focused on television sales and service through it seven decades and has changed as the industry has evolved.

It had grown to include commercial work as well and expanded into audio and home theaters.

When satellite television started to become a thing, Calugar said he saw an opportunity and jumped on it. He first became a dealer for DIRECTV and then later, Dish Network. It was a chance, he saw, for satellite television to grow in Warren and other cities, where space is limited to install the larger satellite dishes that existed before.

“So once you had something the size of a large pizza, it took off and I was doing them. I was selling them, installing them,” Calugar said.

Nowadays, Central TV is a LG authorized dealer and servicer, but also services all brands. It still repairs VCRs and can still fix tube televisions, but parts are nearly impossible to find. Its service portfolio also includes some computer repair now.

In the future, it’s “probably not going to be service-oriented because this stuff keeps coming down in price.”

“The first mistake is they buy a $200 TV and the second mistake is fixing it because labor costs and parts costs have not gone down in price,” said Calugar, who added he understands the attraction of a low price point for consumers and the trend of buying new rather than repairing a broken set.

“If I don’t have steak money, I’m eating hot dogs,” he said.