Our JUCA unit wound up being featured on NBC's Today Show in a very peculiar
way. As best as we can re-construct it, it happened as follows.One of our wood-burners wound up in this Potbelly exhibition that was put on by the New York Hall of Science in Flushing, NY (near New York City). We have no idea how it was chosen to be exhibited. We certainly didn't approach them or pay to have it exhibited or even give them a unit. Shoot! We had never even HEARD of the New York Hall of Science at the time.
They must have bought one from one of the nearly 300 dealers we had Nationally at the time. WE were certainly never told about it or even that there was going to BE an exhibit of Wood-Burning Technology. Of course, we're proud to have been considered one of a very few products with advancements so great as to show them in such an exhibit. But we didn't even know about it until after the fact. And even that was kind of weird.
It turns out that the NBC Today Show did a live broadcast from the site of the exhibit on National TV. As we understand it, the reporter stood for quite a while next to our JUCA, probably because it was by far the physically biggest product exhibited. (Some of the other products would have fit inside our firebox!)
A number of owners of JUCAs saw that program. (None of us did!) Many called us after the show to congratulate us on such a publicity coup! We had no idea what they were talking about! Eventually, we came to understand that the Today Show had our product on (but apparently without identifying it as ours, so it had effectively no marketing effect!) And only THEN we came to find out that it was at the New York Hall of Science. (Wherever that was!) We managed to find a phone number for that museum, and they kindly sent us the two photographs you see here. You now know as much as we do about the whole matter!
The Today Show feature story was apparently aired live on November 8, 1979, but, again, we didn't ever see it or even know it was going to happen!