Old Radios

It was big, encased in polished wood veneer and stood over three feet tall in the southwest corner of the living room. There was a dial, a couple of knobs and a huge speaker grill down near the floor where we would gather to hear tales of the Lone Ranger, Tom Corbett, Space Cadet or Superman. I don’t remember the model but I’m pretty sure it was made by Philco.

Our first radio looked like this one. We laugh at the term “Space Cadet” these days because it became a derogatory term in the 60s. But back in those heady days before Sputnik, it was cool. We followed those stories about the adventures of Corbett and Astro, cadets at the Space Academy as they trained to become members of the Solar Guard. I wanted a Tom Corbett lunch box in the worst way but, alas, I never got a chance to carry one to school.

But I digress; this story is about that old radio. It was newer than the one over at my Grandma Daisy’s home on Atlantic Boulevard across town. Hers had a small circular dial and ours was larger and sported a rectangular dial complete with a needle that moved back and forth in response to a turn of the big knob on the right. Both of them had a great sound but you had to be patient; it took a while for those big old vacuum tubes to warm up and the signal from the radio station began to fill the room and the images of places far away began to form in our minds. That radio had some age on it by time I became aware of it and I wondered if it was on that radio that my Mom and Dad first heard the news about the bombing of Pearl Harbor. I once asked Mom about that, she though so but couldn’t remember for sure.

That old radio was our connection from a sleepy suburb of Jacksonville, Florida to the rest of the world. In my early days, it would play the 6 PM news from WJAX while the family gathered in the adjacent dining room for our evening meals. We soon learned that silence was golden at the dinner table while the news was on.

After dinner it would be relaxing with Amos ‘n Andy, the Jack Benny Show or Fibber McGee and Molly until time for bed. In my very early years, I remember Mom listening to Don McNeil’s Breakfast Club and Arthur Godfrey’s Morning Show. About the same time I started school, our first television, a Muntz, found its place in the northwest corner. All those old friends we had on the radio made their way to black and white TV and the radio had less and less use. Since we were in school by this time, homework came into the picture and the living room was silent until we had finished our work around the dining room table. Time moved slowly as I struggled with math problems and diagramming sentences.

I got so I could care less about where Train A would meet Train B or how many oranges were left. Heck in my case the real answer would be one less orange than the correct answer because I would eat that puppy given half a chance.

I must admit that when algebra, trigonometry and calculus came into my life that my attitude changed about math. Now I could see a practical use for all those calculations. Unfortunately I soon learned that I could set up all those problems correctly but I often made simple math errors because I didn’t practice my addition, subtraction, multiplication or division as much as I should have. So I saw my share of red pencil marks on my exams.

I would have never gotten through engineering school if it wasn’t for slide rules, calculators and computers. I loved computers because I loved setting the problems up in them and letting them do the tedious calculations.

Around the time I started high school, the old console radio burned up its last tube and faded into the mists of time. We had a brand new desktop radio in the living room and I had a brand new transistor radio in my shirt pocket. Tom Corbett and Superman had been replaced by something brand new; DJs playing records. That was a game changer! WPDQ and later WAPE became the prime loci on my radio dial. Now Bo Diddley, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Elvis, Pat Boone and Ozzie and Harriett’s younger son, Ricky Nelson boomed into my earphone as I walked or rode my bike to and from school. It was back then that I discovered that even a 2 ½ inch speaker held to the ear sounded pretty good if you turned the volume up high enough. (Kids, don’t do this at home, it’s bad for the hearing.)

Then came the many automobile radios that worked their way into my life. I wrote about those last week so I won’t rehash that again here. In closing I’ll just say that to this day I can’t stand to drive alone in the car without my radio blasting out the oldies. Oh MY!