Heard it on a Radio

My first was a handheld transistor radio purchased about 1963. I used it to listen to KSTT AM’s weekly Top 40 countdown. That year, the station moved from the Hotel Davenport to a new building at 1111 E. River Drive. When I was in high school we would drive past the station and wave at the disk jockey through the large picture window that faced the street. The corner drug store distributed paper copies of the KSTT Top 40 list and I tried to get one each week so I could follow along with the countdown. I have a couple of those in a scrapbook. The thing about radio was I could listen without the supervision of parents. If I plugged in the earphone, they wouldn’t know I was listening in bed. As a grader, that was important.

There was a large radio in the basement of the American Foursquare home from which I attended grade and high school. It was more a piece of furniture, standing taller than my waist. There was an AM dial yet I mostly used it to receive short wave signals from around the world. I spent a lot of hours roaming the dial and seeing what people said in English. It felt good to be exposed to radio signals from outside the United States. This is something I wouldn’t have done in my Midwestern life without that old radio.

I have few memories of listening to the radio in the series of Volkswagen vehicles I owned in high school and at university. I suppose I did listen to the radio, yet it made no lasting impression on me.

Upon arrival in Mainz, Germany in December 1976, I bought a General Electric multi band radio at the Post Exchange. It used batteries or could be plugged in. It gave up the ghost during the last few years, yet it produced high quality sound as I searched the AM, FM, and shortwave dials. I recall listening to live reports from the Vatican on Armed Forces Radio. The conclave of cardinals was electing a successor to Paul Paul VI and the reporter described the smoke rising from the Sistine Chapel after each vote. It seemed like a big deal when Pope John Paul I was named pontiff. It surprised everyone when he died 33 days into his pontificate.

While serving as an infantry officer, our unit had a long deployment to Baumholder for a training exercise that brought in much of Eighth Infantry Division and some of V Corps. The training was about readiness for a potential invasion of West Germany by the Warsaw Pact Armies through the Fulda Gap. I had roles to play at Baumholder, yet was also responsible to maintain garrison operations back at the kaserne in Mainz-Gonsenheim where we were based. I drove home from Baumholder most Saturday afternoons in my Chevy Truck while listening to Armed Forces Radio. The play list those days was old serialized mystery plays like The Shadow. The same playlist each Saturday helped make the 110 kilometer trip pass quickly. As each program ended, I ticked off the miles on the journey home.

In 1988 our family moved to Lake County in Northwest Indiana. We lived in a tract home in a neighborhood where all the homes appeared to have a similar design that included a ranch-style structure situated on a crawl space. Our version had a detached garage where most of my stuff lived in boxes. I had some space on the built in living room book shelves, an easy chair I received as a Christmas gift, and in the corner of the dining area we placed a word processor where I could write. I listened to local radio in our garage, mostly on weekends when I worked on projects.

Indiana, during the six years we lived there, was in transition. The heyday of large steel mills had ended and was being replaced by smaller, more efficient steel production facilities. Manufacturing across the Midwest was suffering because of the Reagan Revolution which drove it to locales where labor was cheaper. The local radio warned about developing a “steel-mill mentality” and to develop interests, especially among younger people, outside the mills.

There was a radio swap show on Saturday mornings. On it, callers would report items for sale and leave contact information. At the trucking terminal I managed, one Friday there was a theft from one of the parked trucks. The stolen consumer goods turned up on the radio swap show.

Folks in Lake County were mostly good people, although of an attitude that reminded me more of grouchy Bucks County, Pennsylvania folks than Iowans. Our daughter went to public school beginning in Kindergarten and it was a type of experience where kids, especially Hispanic kids, would be pulled out of school without notice, never to be seen in school again.

I traveled extensively throughout Indiana, visiting most parts of the state in my six years there. The radio was a constant companion even if I can’t recall to which stations I listened. About the only sure thing was listening to one of the two Chicago traffic radio stations when I had to make a trip into the city.

We moved back to Iowa in 1993 which was the heyday of Iowa Public Radio’s Saturday afternoon lineup. Programs like Thistle and Shamrock, Mountain Stage, and A Prairie Home Companion made an afternoon leading to supper time for me. It was more times than I can remember. I also listened to Car Talk while working in the garage on Saturday mornings. Listening to Iowa Public Radio on Saturdays was a thing until it wasn’t, due to budget cuts, Garrison Keillor retiring, and the coming to the air waves of local musician Bob Dorr who dominated the afternoons. To be honest, I could take only so many instances of Dorr going through his collection of vinyl LPs. It was the end of an era.

Today I mostly listen to afternoon news reports on public radio while fixing dinner, classical music when working in the kitchen during the afternoon, and to country music while driving in my automobile. The garage radio is usually tuned to country music. Automobile listening has become more important because the station to which I tune in is targeted by political advertisers. I can tell who’s got the dough for ads and who doesn’t. That, along with messaging, informs my view of what Republicans in the state are up to. Democrats don’t spend as much on radio advertising, simply because they don’t have the dollars.

The story of my radio listening isn’t just this. However, this post provides a sample of my life, something basic to my personality.

When our child lived in Colorado, before Keillor went off the air, I cooked dinner for us in their apartment with a Prairie Home Companion on in the background. It was a shared family experience that remained important to us. I value such memories. They can’t be repeated, only remembered. Memory of radio listening has become increasingly important as I age.