On your AM Radio Dial

I saw my first television broadcast just before my tenth birthday, and it was another three or four years before we had our first television set in the home. Prior to that we listened to a table model Philco AM radio with a wooden cabinet and an external antenna wire. Radio was king in those days, and your radio personalities were national or local celebrities. Radio, much like books, required you to use your imagination to create the scenes portrayed by the characters. Television could never have created a set as foreboding and drear as my mind portrayed Jack Benny's money vault down in the dungeon of his home, and Fibber McGee's closet would never have been as funny as a sight gag as it was in my own mind. You knew the Shadow was there in the room with the bad guy, but on television you just see the bad guy by himself in a room. The same thing happens today when they take a book you've enjoyed and make a movie from it. To start they have to leave so much out to make it into a two hour movie, but the scenes and characters never resemble the ones you've created in your mind. It's almost always a big let-down. So much so I generally refuse to see a movie made from a book I've liked.

My grandmother had one of the huge old floor model radios with a cabinet that was a fine piece of furniture. It used such large vacuum tubes it must have made the electric meter spin when it was turned on. On a cold day you could stand next to it to keep warm. With an outside antenna that ran most of the length of the property it could, when the weather was right, pick up signals from around the world. There were actually spots on the dial identified by city names such as London, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Tokyo, and with the proper weather inversion you could actually receive these foreign language broadcasts. FM radio is primarily dependent on line of sight, but the AM signals could skip around the world. My brother-in-law and I, sitting in central Indiana, listened to "Music of the Islands, from the Islands", Honolulu Hawaii for a couple of hours one night, and it was the strongest station on the dial. That was on a small, table model AM radio with no external antenna too. At times radio was an adventure.

If I could return to those days and the programming we enjoyed, I wouldn't. I still remember how magical it seemed to have movie shows in your own living room once television hit the scene, and today's news from around the world in real time is sheer magic. I'll never forget how the radio brought me the world, entertained me, and added so much to the pleasant memories of childhood.

One program I remember from childhood was called "The Renfro Valley Barn Dance", a country music show that was on every Saturday night. Last week-end we drove through Renfro Valley, Kentucky and that's what started this train of thought. I'm happy to announce the barn dance still goes on, though I don't know if it's broadcast these days.