Salute to Circuitry

“It was on this day in 1954 that the first transistor radio appeared on the market.”

That was the first sentence out of Garrison Keillor’s mouth after he introduced today’s segment of The Writer’s Almanac on public radio. His voice issued, in fact, from one of two transistor radios perched most of the time on the windowsill of our basement bathroom. The larger one typically is tuned to 88.5, WAMU-FM, the public radio station of American University. The other, pocket-sized one usually is tuned to 103.5, all-news WTOP-FM.

The pocket-sized one—a Sony that’s currently available at Amazon.com for the low, low price of $14.65 plus shipping—is a triplet. I store an identical radio in a desk upstairs for transport to our bathroom on that level of the house, where I often shower on weekends because the water pressure’s better than in the basement shower. I keep a third Sony in my desk at work.

As Keillor spoke about the transistor radio’s early evolution from a Texas Instruments model that cost a whopping $49.95 to a much-cheaper Sony snapped up by teenagers to listen to rock ‘n’ roll out of their disapproving parents’ earshot, I knew I had to publicly wish this once-transformative device—now rendered so quaint and limited by the iPod, iPhone and its i-ilk—a happy 59th birthday.

How do I love thee, transistor radio? Let me count the memories. Such as how you lulled me to sleep in the 1960s, snug against my ear under the covers while my older brother obliviously slept in the other twin bed. New York City’s “77, WABC” (that jingle!) was a Top 40 station then, at a time when substantial bands like Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones actually had Top 40 hits. I felt like a member of a secret society, awake while the world slept. I well remember the 2 a.m. ads for Dennison’s Clothiers that made the store sound vast, though we’d sometimes drive by its tiny building on trips into the city and call it “Dennison’s Clothes Booth.” I recall The Beatles’ “The Long and Winding Road” edging me closer to slumber thanks to producer George Martin's over-the-top strings arrangement. I recollect the joyful gibberish of one particular percussion-laden tune in a foreign tongue that I’d only decades identify as the work of trailblazing Miriam Makeba—described by Wikipedia as “the first artist from Africa to popularize African music around the world.”

A few years later, I would learn of the Pittsburgh Pirates’ game seven win in the 1971 World Series over the Baltimore Orioles on my transistor radio as I walked my bike up the hill from a playing field at Mountain Park School in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey. I’d been far too nervous to watch the game on TV. I lifted the bike’s front off the ground to pop a celebratory wheelie, then arrived home just in time to see a teammate pour champagne over future Hall of Famer Roberto Clemente’s head.

My family’s move a year later to Greensboro, North Carolina, was difficult for me, but it was made a little easier by the fact that I could pick up both the aforementioned WABC and KDKA-AM Pittsburgh at night on my transistor radio.

The compact device’s role as my stalwart companion in times of fraught transition continued through the 1980s and ’90s, as public radio stations helping me adjust to life in such godforsaken outposts as Thomasville, North Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia. In Thomasville, my transistor radio afforded me a world of culture and intrigue in stark contrast to the drawls and parochialism all around me. In steamy Savannah, Marian McPartland literally jazzed things up with her interviews of musicians, and A Prairie Home Companion let me escape, however briefly, to a mythical Midwest of cool temperatures and Lutheran temperaments.

The new century ushered in new technologies and new ways of accessing music and radio stations. But it was via transistor radios that I first became acquainted with the DC stations that would become the mainstays of my morning and afternoon drives to work, and where I first heard most of the music in my ever-growing CD collection.

Today, I enjoy being able to stream radio stations from near and far on my phone, and I appreciate the theoretical musical options of Pandora and iTune playlists, although I haven’t yet gone those routes. Still, just as there’s nothing for me quite like the tactile and visual pleasures of the print newspaper, there’s nothing to match the tactile and auditory pleasures of turning on a transistor radio and carrying it from room to room, or out into the yard for the distractions of baseball, football, rock and bluegrass while I’m cutting the grass and pulling weeds. I enjoy the looks of passers-by as my transistor radio blares—not an earbud in sight—and my neighbors plainly wonder (nostalgically or pityingly, depending on their age) at my anachronistic ways.

In fact, I close out most weekends Sunday night with snatches of “The Big Broadcast” on WAMU, steeling myself for the coming work week by listening in on Joe Friday and Matt Dillon as they handily defeat the rogues of the Old West and of post-war, noir Los Angeles.

Anyway, as Detective Friday used to say, the story you have just heard [read] is true. And here’s hoping that the scrappy, marginalized transistor radio will yet celebrate many more birthdays. Certainly my life would have been—still would be—considerably less rich without it.

One Hundred Posts of Lassitude (More or Less)

This may or may not be my 100th blog post. Blogger, the host site, puts my count of previous posts at 99. But when I conducted my own tally while jotting down brief summaries of each post (to remind myself what the hell I’ve written about in the three-plus years since I started this thing in July 2010), I counted 101 entries to date.

Whatever. Let’s just assume this is number 100, so I can proceed with a retrospective to mark this historic occasion. Never mind that somehow the eyes of world seem not to be on this milestone, what with such distractions as the ongoing war in Syria, the aftermath of the mall siege in Nairobi, the kickoff of “Obamacare,” and the related Republican hissy-fit that has shut down our dysfunctional government. (What is not a distraction is the Navy Yard shooting, as it’s already been forgotten, because America won’t allow anything to sully its all-consuming love affair with guns.)   

Come to think of it, I guess there’s another reason that anticipation of my 100th post hasn’t gone viral. That would be the fact that this blog’s readership has stabilized at somewhere in the low single digits over the course of the past 39 months. Many thanks, regardless, to those of you who continue to read, often checking in vain for new posts. My frequency has dipped since that heady first month—which remains  the standard-bearer, with seven posts. By contrast, I’ve posted no more than twice any month this year. And two months—February and April—went completely dark.

In August I wrote about how I’m going to try to start writing shorter and more frequently, by not making each post a day-long project that I dread because, as much as my ego likes to see my words up there on the Internet, my lazy ass would rather lie on a couch or sit in a movie theater seat on my days off. Suffice it to say, I’m still working on that.

Anyway, a lot has changed in my life and in the world since July 2010, while other things have remained the same, for good and for bad. In that first month of posts, for example, I made reference to our greyhound, Ellie, who had cancer, and to our cat, Winnie, who as far as we knew had many years ahead of her. The Big C since has claimed both of them. Ellie’s successor, Bean the three-legged mutt hound, to whom I dedicated a post in December 2010, still is very much with us. He’s a joy in his own sloppy, massively shedding way. And Tess, Winnie’s littermate or mother (we never knew which; they were rescues we acquired together) continues to delight us with her demanding, complaining ways, which have earned her the nicknames “Crab Cat” and “Crumb Kitten.” Tessie is aging and shows signs of possible serious health issues. As I type this, however, she is luxuriating, stretched out, on the carpet in front of our upstairs bathroom—one of her absolute favorite spots.

Also in that first month of posts, I wrote about John Wojnowski, the obsessed senior citizen who has made it his mission to shame the Catholic Church for its tolerance of child-molesting priests. He’s still out there, battling Rome and his own personal demons, straddling the line between determined and unhinged. I see him whenever I drive down Embassy Row on weekends, hoisting his provocative signs. I haven’t noticed whether John has yet indicted Pope Francis as a “sodomizer,” as he had Francis' predecessor.

In August 2010, my post “The Immortal Mortals” discussed celebrities and other people in the news who seem as if they’ve always been with us and always will be, and whose deaths somehow surprise us when they inevitably occur. Some examples I gave then were newly deceased newsman Daniel Schorr and, before him, comedian and actor George Burns—a guy who’d had played God on film and seemed intent on mimicking His lifespan. Three other luminaries in the same vein who still were plugging happily along at that time—fitness guru Jack Lalanne, comedian Phyllis Diller, and football coach Joe Paterno—since have passed away. And Paterno’s end, of course, was an ignominious one.

In September 2010 I wrote the first of two posts to date about “the other Eric Ries”—a 30-something guru of web-savvy entrepreneurship who hails from California. He has a national following and has relegated the Eric Ries whose words you’re reading now to an extremely deep scroll—several hundred links down—on any given search of our joint name. My “Dynamic Doppelganger,” as I dubbed him in that initial post, hasn’t responded the couple of times I’ve encouraged him to rebut my characterization of his life’s work as so much lucrative bullshit. (And boring, to boot.) When I told my friend Jason that this blog was approaching post number 100, he suggested that, if and when I ever hit 250, I dedicate that one to success in forcing the other Eric to engage me. We’ll see—about getting to post 250 and about goading my Left Coast counterpart to response—but I must say I'm intrigued by this idea.

The death of an older woman named Joyce prompted me, in February 2011, to reminisce about the wonderfully memorable senior citizens I’d gotten to know over the years as a volunteer visitor to Springhouse of Westwood, a local assisted living facility. Joyce had always berated me for having failed to get on Jeopardy!, where she was certain I’d have raked in the dough. She also was incredulous that the dusty junk proffered for appraisal on Antiques Roadshow tended to be valued so highly. God, I missed her when she passed. I still do. Joyce would be appalled that I’ve still never appeared on Jeopardy!, and that the Roadshow continues to find great retail value in all manner of hideous knickknacks and home decorations—items Joyce more likely would have donated to the Salvation Army.

In fact, last fall—as I subsequently noted in a January 2013 post—I  ended my dozen-year run of Monday nights at Springhouse when the last of my most recent group of “TV buddies” died off. I’m grateful for the friendships and memories, but it still feels weird not to drive over there anymore. I recently have taken on a second person to volunteer-visit through a senior services agency in Washington, DC, in part to assuage my ongoing guilt.

My cantankerous senior friend Helen, whose strange middle-of-the-night phone call to me I recounted in a March 2011 post, also has since passed away. I think of her—fondly, mostly—every time I run past her old condo building near American University, where I visited her for years, before her health deteriorated and nursing homes became her fate. When a social worker for that DC senior services agency recently asked me if I could deal with a senior lady who often is “difficult,” I looked back on my friendship with Helen and answered, essentially, “Bring it on.”

April 2011 was the first time I wrote about my long and unhappily dysfunctional relationship with the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball team. In fact, the post just before this one, written last month, was about how the “Bucs” finally, after two decades of execrable play, were about to ensure a winning record for the first time since 1992. I wrote that I would celebrate that long-elusive 82nd win of the 162-game baseball season with a celebratory cupcake, which I would savor. Well, what happened was this: Win number 82 was several agonizing days in coming after that post was written. Eating the cupcake just made me feel fat. And, although I’d kidded myself that I’d be content with 82 wins, when the team subsequently blew a couple of games in the late innings on their way to a regular-season record of 94-68, I was bat shit beside myself. At this writing, the Pirates have won the National League wild card play-in game and are set to meet the St Louis Cardinals in the next round of the playoffs, starting later today. I truly feel that I’ll be fine with whatever happens from here. But, well, let’s just say it remains to be seen how well that’ll work out.

I still love my no-longer-so-new driver’s license photo, which I felt compelled to serenade with a post in June 2011. Even now, every time I’m called upon to produce an ID, I think to myself, “Who is that handsome devil?”

July 2011 was the first time I touched on the scourge of gun violence in this space, prompted by the Gabrielle Giffords shooting in Phoenix. I revisited the subject in subsequent posts, but I now wonder if there’s anything left to say. After all, nothing ever changes in this gun-crazy country. And I do mean “crazy,” as the defiant disconnect between all the carnage and our laughably lax firearms laws strikes me as insane.

Moving on. The death of Steve Jobs prompted me to write in October 2011 about my mostly hate relationship with the Digital Age he did so much to usher in. The hyper-connected world in which we live continues to disconcert and depress me in myriad ways. But, as I would note in later posts, Lynn and I do now have smartphones. And although I’m far from surgically attached to mine, I do find it useful and I am glad I have it. Still, the 21st century seems not hear my constant cries of “Enough, already!” The digitalization of our every moment (waking and not) continues, at a breathtaking pace.

In a February 2012 post I shared my somewhat counterintuitive affection for bluegrass, given my utterly suburban upbringing and that music genre’s cheerleading veneration of God and country. I remain a fan, but I was saddened by the retirement from the airwaves last week of Ray Davis, my favorite DJ on WAMU Bluegrass Country. Whenever I hear a particularly woeful fiddle-and-banjo-laden tune, however, I’ll think of Ray and pronounce it a “plum pitiful.”

A June 2012 post was devoted to the guilty pleasure I derive from the Investigation Discovery channel’s all-murder-and-mayhem-all-the-time programming—rife as it is with lurid, cheesy reenactments, and as celebratory as it is of the very violence I abhor in American life. But what can I say, it’s still my go-to source for fixes of sex, sadism and serial killers. When a friend told me a few months after that post that she knows the guy who played the BTK killer in one of those cheesy reenactments, it was all I could do to refrain from requesting his autograph.

Re-reading my scant selection of posts so far this year—only 10 in past nine months—I don’t really see anything that needs updating. My nemesis Bruce Feiler (March) continues to vex me. Bertha and I continue to make halting conversation and bemoan our lack of lottery success as she empties my office wastebasket (June). Oh, my British friend Clive, about whom I wrote in August, subsequently e-mailed me to report that he has never himself employed the rather excellent word “rumbustious,” even though it reputedly is a UK creation.

So, that brings us up to date. Thanks for taking this trip with me down the Lassitude Come Home version of Memory Lane. If I ever make good on my intention to start writing shorter and posting more frequently, it won’t take me another three years to reach post 200.  At which point the other Eric Ries had better start watching his back.