FIRST: I'm a young kid of seven or eight. My sister and I are in the back seat and it is once again past our regular bedtime. Dad's driving. Mom's riding shotgun. The push-button car radio (AM only, thank you very much) provides hokie music, then news. The magic minute of 10:07 p.m. arrives, and the creaking door and croaking tone (of E.G. Marshall) usher in CBS Radio Mystery Theatre on WHAM. Mom is concerned it will scare the kids too much this late at night. She doesn't realize I listen to it almost every night in my room, under the covers, through the earphone on my little transistor radio. She's right, of course: That show, coupled with my vivid imagination, are far too scary for this time of night. Got to listen, though, because the dark bedroom to come with all its sinister shadows is half the fun.
SECOND: I'm a little older, maybe 11 or 12, and I alone am awake in the house at 3 a.m. I am rattled and anxious -- no doubt part of the teeth-grinding, mind-twisting crossing-of-days that was adolescence. I'm going out of my mind, staring at the ceiling, feeling every sting of yesterday's junior high social slings and arrows, and hearing every crack and groan of that old house. I reach under my bed, and there's that same old transistor radio, mostly thrown over for album sides and eight-tracks, but still faithful. I turn it on (the nine-volt is still juiced!) and find WSAY on the dial, just as the DJ drops the needle on Nights in White Satin (the full, poetry- and kettle-drum-soaked album version, of course...I mean, we're talking about WSA-freakin'-Y here). I breathe deep, comforted, close my eyes and drift away.
I have always loved radio. From those early days with it's constant, time-marking presence to today. When I was 17 it was WCMF and WMJQ hanging with me at the house before school; Mom and Dad being long gone to work, and me fighting off the morning lonelies. When I was 19 and suddenly came to myself in Fortran 77 class, rose and walked out on the day's lecture and my ill-chosen Computer Science major, it was the studios of Brockport State's student-run WBSU to which I turned.
Within two years, I was station manager. Within three years, I was out in the broadcasting world, Communication degree in hand, hosting a jazz show in the very-same studio where some DJ had once sat and played Nights in White Satin at 3 a.m. all those years ago (by then it was WXXI-AM, which has long-since moved from that odd house/studio on French Road that they had inherited from Gordon Brown's scattershot, eccentric experiment in freeform acid rock/Roman Catholic radio).
In the ensuing years I have DJ-ed and produced off an on, but mostly I have listened. I have listened and loved Garrison Keillor, Diane Rhem, Terri Gross, Click-and-Clack, Bob Smith, Bob Matthews and Bob Edwards. I have continued to root against the Yankees, but for the broadcast team of Suzyn Waldman (a brilliant baseball mind) and John Sterling ("th-uhhhhh pitch..."calling every single game without fail since 1989). I have listened and winced at the invective of many current talk-radio hosts, but have begrudgingly recognized the consummate skill with which they deliver it.
Radio. No other broadcast medium allows you to cast heroes and villains from your own imagination. No other broadcast medium can quite crawl inside you while you are busy doing other things. It still travels the open air, seeps in your ear and dances in your head with whatever it finds on your mind at the time. What are your memories of radio?
(And now a word from our sponsor: On Friday, December 3rd at 7 p.m., our church will be transformed into old-time radio studio WBCC for A Bloomfield Home Companion, complete with radio-theatre comedy and drama produced live before your eyes, our own house band burning up the music of Patsy Cline, Old Crow Medicine Show, Hank Williams, Bing Crosby, and Lucinda Williams, and special displays and archived broadcasts provided by the Antique Wireless Association Museum. Tickets are a mere eight bucks!)
