On the Radio

I don’t listen to the radio much anymore.  Sure, I turn it on when I’m in the car driving around town and running errands.  Then I’ll listen to NPR or the community radio station with its eclectic contemporary music format.  When these stations are in their fundraising mode, I’ll flip to the classic rock station or if I’m desperate, I’ll listen for a while to sports talk radio.  But I hardly ever turn on the radio at home.

Yet when I was growing up, the radio was an integral part of my life.  No, I’m not part of the generation that gathered with their families around the radio in the evening to hear one of those great shows like The Shadow.  My family had a television.  But the TV was never turned on in the mornings when we were getting ready for school.  Instead, my mom would be in the kitchen making coffee and putting out breakfast while listening to KDKA blasting its 50,000 watts into Pittsburgh’s airwaves.  Morning disc jockey Rege Cordic made us smile with his zany antics, and Ed Shaughnessy gave us the news and the all-important school closings.  Then, all summer long my parents would sit on the front porch to escape the heat while Bob Prince regaled us with baseball stories interspersed with the play-by-play from the Pirates game.  The radio was the only way to “see” a home game.

At my first communion party, the only present I really cared about was the transistor radio that my godparents bought for me.  Before that, I had annoyed everyone by walking around the house holding a cufflink box to my ear, pretending it was one of those miniature radios that I longed for.  When my brothers and I became old enough to do the dinner dishes, the radio was there in the kitchen to keep us company.  We listened to Chuck Brinkman on KQV spin the latest tunes from the Beatles, The Dave Clark Five and other groups that were part of the British Invasion.  My older brother tired of that style of music and turned to WAMO, intoducing me to Porky Chedwick, soul music and the Motown sound. 

In Junior High I did my homework listening to Terry Lee’s “TL Sound” on WMCK.  At ten o’clock, TL would switch to “Music for Young Lovers.”  Who could resist as the Duprees crooned, “See the pyramids along the Nile . . .?”  In the late 1960s, Motown gave way to psychedelic music and we all ran out to get FM radios so we could listen to WDVD and WYDD.  The FM DJs talked very low and really slow as they played entire record albums straight through.  My best friend joined the Columbia Record Club so he could get twelve albums for $1.99, despite having to buy a bunch more at the regular, exorbitant Club prices.  The radio helped us decide which ones to buy.  And when the Steelers finally started winning in the 1970s, we watched them on TV, but turned the sound down so we could listen to the radio announcers, Jack Fleming and Myron Cope, on WTAE.

I’m not sure when my love affair with the radio ended, but it was probably sometime in the late 1970s when stations started playing disco.  Techno-pop in the 1980s wasn’t any better and the only other choices seemed to be oldies and country.  What had been new and exciting album rock turned into classic rock – another form of oldies, featuring mostly Led Zeppelin, Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Steve Miller Band.

 

So now I rarely turn on the radio when I’m at home.  If I feel like listening to music, I’ll put on a record or CD.  My son recently suggested that I try Pandora, and that’s a nice source of music, but it lacks personality.  I guess WYEP, the community radio station, comes the closest to giving me what first attracted me to radio – identifiable personalities, contemporary music with occasional oldies, news and weather.  When I think about it, it’s actually a pretty good radio station.  Okay, I guess I’ve run out of excuses.  It’s time to go to their website and donate to their latest fundraising drive.