The Radio Star is Still Alive

[anahata56]

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When I was a kid, one of the most influential aspects of my cultural life was a series of flimsy, miniature transistor radios. I had one with me at all times, running them until they broke in my hands (and I often repaired them with twister ties and duct tape to keep them going long enough for my allowance to cover the purchase of a new one) and endlessly feeding them the square little 9 volt batteries that kept them singing. Sometimes, they were attached to my ear by an earphone, but mostly, they lived under my pillow at night, where I could listen to the voices of Dr. Don Rose and George Michael and Brother Lee Love and Long John Wade as they announced the hits as they were newly minted, in a time when it seemed that someone opened up a cask of gloriously heady music and poured it directly into our hearts.

It was a time when all of us listened to Top 40 AM radio (FM was a little too strange and esoteric for us), and those songs literally became the soundtrack of our lives, inducing the tears that healed our childish heartbreaks, and that caused us to bounce in our chairs in adolescent exuberance. It was where a lot of us got our news as well--I distinctly recall hearing about the assassination of Martin Luther King on the radio of my father's car, on a warming April evening, and waking early one late September morning to the sound of "Operator" as the DJ announced that Jim Croce had been killed in a plane crash while we were sleeping.

There was something wonderful about a disc jockey--a voice, a friend who could help you cope, someone who cared about what you were feeling. No matter the fact that the premise was a fundamental delusion, you believed that the DJ was a person involved in your life, as they announced the high school basketball scores and the sock hops and the graduations, and who actually said the name of your school when snow closed it for the day, and who played what you requested when you picked up the phone and asked them to.

They became as much a part of your life as any other friend--except that they were a lot cooler.

Around here, there were WFIL ("Famous 56--Rockin' in the cradle of liberty")/WIBG ("Wibbage") wars, and I was DIE HARD WFIL, even though I was secretly a fan of Hy Lit and Jerry Blavat as well, mostly because they were so cool you could hardly breathe when they were on...But my day wouldn't start without Dr. Don and Lulubelle the cow, or end without Long John speaking intently into my ear in the dark...

These days, I have CD's and an MP3 player, and I can listen to whatever I want, whenever I want. Which is OK, I suppose--but there's something distinctly missing in that experience. And for the longest time, I couldn't figure out why I wasn't enjoying that as much as I could be...

And then it dawned on me--no DJ's.

So I asked my husband if such a thing as a transistor radio still existed--if there was still such a thing as a radio that you could carry with you, in your pocket, and listen to wherever you went.

He told me that he didn't think so--that most radios were like little boom boxes, and that he didn't know if a such a thing as a transistor radio equivalent even existed.

But...

He found one!

A little one, with an armband attached to it, and ear buds (there's no such thing as an earphone anymore, because nobody broadcasts in mono anymore, not even on AM, where I only get my news now), and I can carry it in my pocket if I want, and feed it batteries, and take it wherever I go.

And I have been.

And the crazy thing is that, lo these many years later, I'm still listening to the Temptations and Marvin and Tammy and the Beach Boys and the Beatles and Sam Cooke and Aretha...and Jim Croce.

And the DJ's....the friends whose voices I missed in the sad silence between the songs on my MP3 player.

It makes me more ridiculously pleased than you can possibly imagine.