If you wanted to be the first on your block to have a transistor radio seventy years ago, one good way to meet that goal would be to build the one described in the May 1956 issue of Popular Electronics.  It was said to pull in local stations with loudspeaker volume with no external antenna.  It consisted basically of a crystal set followed by four stages of audio amplification.

Crystal sets often have very wide tuning, due to the detector loading down the tuned circuit and reducing the Q factor.  In this case, however, the coil is tapped to reduce this effect.