Ah, the pleasures of listening to the radio.
Now is the time that National Public Radio stations all over the country are in the midst of their semi-annual pledge drives, and I am apt to contribute to several (in fact I already have).
One of my very first memories (I was 2 or 3) is one of listening to an old radio while sitting in the living room of my paternal grandparents' home at 308 South Conception Street in Mobile, Alabama (Interstate 10 - right before it takes a sweeping turn into the Bankhead Tunnel - runs right over where their home used to be).
My father had an old brown portable radio (filled with tubes - transistors were not included then) that he lugged around with him during his professional baseball days in the minor leagues of the 1940s and early '50s.
AS I approached my teens, I stayed up late at night listening to my dad's old radio to station KAAY in Little Rock and their late-night show "Bleeker Street." Loved it.
Later (in highschool and just after), I thoroughly enjoyed my stint working in news and as a DJ in my hometown radio station KSIG 1450AM in Crowley, Louisiana. For thousands of people, listening to KSIG's Bill (Williams) and Shel (Kanter) Show each morning during some part of their 5-8am program was a south Louisiana ritual for almost 50 years.
Since radio has been in my blood for quite some time, I decided to do some research on the history radio.
In the 1920s, only the affluent could buy radios; each one cost $120 or more. If you could afford it, you usually had to assemble it yourself. In 1921, the radio station WJZ of Newark, New Jersey, was the first to broadcast a baseball World Series, but it wasn't until the 1930s that most sports fans began to turn regularly to radio to hear contests live.
After the Great Depression descended, factories churned out radio consoles and tabletop versions for as little as $5, and automobile manufacturers added them to their cars. The market for radios grew even larger when President Franklin Roosevelt passed legislation in 1936 to bring electricity to the nation's farmlands, where one quarter of the population lived.
Floor model radios became the new hearths in homes, and family members crowned them with cherished family photos. Any form of entertainment that could convey itself with sound alone used the medium to reach its audience.
Families gathered around their radios to laugh at comedian Jack Benny or ventriloquist's dummy Charlie McCarthy -- or to try to solve a murder mystery. Daytime radio became dominated by soap operas.
After school, boys and girls would listen to radio dramas such as "Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy" or "Captain Midnight." On October 31, 1938, Orson Welles spooked many listeners when he broadcast the radio drama "The War of the Worlds," which reported that Martians had landed in New Jersey. A year later, 20 million listeners tuned in regularly to "The Lone Ranger."
In 1935, when the racehorse Seabiscuit started racing, two-thirds of the nation's homes had a radio. A few years later, at the height of the horse's popularity, 90 percent of homes had one.
Newspapers reached thousands, movies reached even more, but radio was different because millions of people all tuned in to the same live event at the same time all over the nation. One of the most radio-friendly events in the world of sports was the horse race: unpredictable, dramatic, and over in only a few minutes.
"Radio was, in the period when Seabiscuit was around, the center of a family's existence," says author Gene Smith. "The radio was practically the size of today's refrigerator. It was burnished, with terrific wood, walnut or mahogany, and the dialing of it required great finesse, which was the province of the father of the house.
"There was one radio per house, no matter whose house it was, and people saved for their radio, and it was delivered, and it was a miraculous thing, a miraculous, wonderful invention. It could bring the sound of Jack Dempsey beating [Georges] Carpentier to a Montana rancher.
"It could bring Franklin D. Roosevelt saying 'my friends' to Louisiana plantations, and it could bring ballplayers Joe Dimaggio and Lou Gherig and Jackie Robinson to listeners all over the United States."
Even my father's career after baseball included radio: he fixed and sold them until TVs hit the culture, then focused on selling those and other electronic entertainment gadgets from 1954-94.
Radio. I can't imagine my life without it. Donate something to your local public station.
