MEMORY OF THE DAY: RADIO DAYS

Well, it has been a while since I posted a story. It has been hard to recall good days since my little brother Wayne passed away a few months ago, but this short story came to me today and I ran with it. It is a short read and maybe it will recall some fond memory you might have from your youth.

Before there was streaming so that you can watch whatever you want, whenever you want, before there was cable, before there was television, before there was MP4, before there were DVDs, before there were CDs; there were radio, movies, and if you were lucky, a record player. Now I won’t tell you that I remember a time before there was TV, but I will say that I remember a time when we didn’t have one.

What we did have though was the Fiske Theater that I could get into for fifteen cents and watch a Saturday matinee with double feature western movies separated by a few cartoons, and a weekly serial that ran each Saturday afternoon like a soap opera so that you didn’t really want to miss any episode.

At home we had a record player with LP albums that featured mostly Bing Crosby and Mario Lanza. I didn’t listen to many records before my brother Wayne, and I got a portable record player from my grandfather in Pennsylvania. Then I started picking up other records two of my favorites were Al Hirt and The Brothers Four.

What I do remember for home entertainment was the radio. We could listen to music on the radio, and we could also listen to radio shows. I’ll confess that I don’t recall much about the radio shows except for Sunday mornings. On Sunday morning my dad would head down to the little shop where the shoe shine man also sold the paper. Dad would bring the Sunday paper home and my brother and I would get the funny papers first. We would lay the funnies out on the living room floor and lay down there on our stomachs and follow along as a voice from the radio read the comics to us. The show only lasted about a half hour but we were quiet and enthralled for that half hour so my parents were happy about that.

*As a foot note to the radio shows mentioned above, during our first tour in Germany from 1972 to 1975, we got one tv channel, Armed Forces Network (AFN). It came on at noon and signed off at about 10:00. The shows we got were mostly weather and news along with a number of 1950s black and white western shows. Most were half hour shows. We did, though also get old radio shows on the AFN radio. I remember listening to Gunsmoke with William Conrad as Matt Dillon, and The Shadow.

We finally got a console television set about the time I turned 8 or 9 years old. Then the radio and funny papers were replaced with Winky Dink on the television on Sunday mornings. Winky Dink was an “interactive” television show that featured Buffalo Bob Smith, the host of the Howdy Doody show on weekdays, and a cartoon character that was always getting into trouble of some sort that we would have to help get him out of. We were able to do that by ordering the Winky Dink kit. I am not sure how we convinced our parents to let us order the kit, but they did. When it came in, there was a piece of acetate and a grease pencil included. The idea was that if Winky Dink fell into a well we would stick the acetate on the tv screen and draw a ladder for him to climb out. Once we drew a helicopter to extricate Winky from some other disaster.