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.
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