A few days ago I was sitting on the back porch, killing time and having a few beers. The wife was in the front yard interrogating some newly-planted hydrangeas. They weren't performing up to snuff and she was trying to sort it all out.
I had our little radio on the porch with me, and was casually scanning the FM dial trying to find something to listen to; I had no luck. All I could get was some fuzzy stations coming from Houston (90 miles south), Lufkin (some 60 miles north east), or Nacogdoches (about 60 miles east). I was getting concerned, as I'm a radio junky and always enjoy having one handy.
Suddenly it dawned on me that I was only using half my arsenal. I flipped the switch over to AM. Voila! All manner of stations and all sorts of music.
Which got me to thinking...
Assuming you could pry the umbilical cord ear buds out of their heads, or tear their gaze away from their phone, to ask them, asking a Gen-X'er or Gen-Y'er what their first radio was and they would probably get you a blank stare. I'm not talking about a Walkman, MP3 player, or boom box. I'm talking about a radio, a transistor radio. Separate AM and FM bands, with an antenna.
Mine was a Philco. It had a silver aluminum body with plastic dials for AM and FM tuning. The volume control was a dial on the side. It had about a six inch long antenna. The 9 volt battery went in the back. (Be sure to test the 9 volt on your tongue to see if it was strong enough).
I got it in 1972 on my eighth birthday, which was the year that the Texas Rangers moved to Arlington from Washington D.C.
I remember laying in bed at night with the radio under my pillow, listening to the game. The best games were when they played on the West Coast, so I could stay up really late and listen, long after my parents and sisters were in bed.
Mom and Dad were on to my trick, of course, and while Mom would frequently come in and squawk at me to go to sleep, Dad would coast by a little while later, pop his head in the door, "What's the score?"
I would often fall asleep in the middle of the game. If I were very lucky it would coincide with a rain delay in the game, and I would awake in the middle of night and my Rangers would still be playing. For all I knew I was the only fan still listening.
I would also frequently fall asleep and wake up in the early morning hours listing to Bill Mack's Country Roads show, from which I got a good foundation in country music.
Baseball is a seasonal game, though, of course. Between games I would sit in my room and scan the dial. Pop stations on the AM dial, only, please. FM was still in its infancy and there were few good FM stations in the early '70's.
The groups and songs that my kids laugh at today were staples back then: The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down (Paper Lace), Billy Don't Be A Hero (Also Paper Lace), One Tin Solider (Coven), Back Home Again (John Denver). The Beatles were still popular, of course, along with Elton John and the Rolling Stones.
I look at kids today and see these wildly popular, and really very technologically impressive, toys that they all have glued into their ears, and I sort of feel sorry for them. So few of them know the satisfaction of very carefully turning the tuner and finally, finally, pulling in the static-free station that they've been looking for.
I'm not sure what finally happened to that radio. I'm sure that it finally broke and I just threw it away, the boy in me not realizing that there might one day be a time when it would represent a happy part of my childhood, when an eight year old boy was discovering what would be a life-long love...baseball.
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