When I was around 10 years old, i remember having to sleep in my brother's room in one of his twin beds. i believe that my grandmother was home from the hospital and using my room. the bed was next to the window, facing towards norfolk. at the time, a lot of the housing development had not been developed, and i could lie in the bed and see in the distance a radio tower blinking red. i remember watching it blink, thinking about how far away it was, or how close. it was relaxing, and comforting and the world was quiet out there and there was this sense of a whole world out there that was stable and calm and consistent, just like that light. sometimes when i try to go to sleep at night and can't, i think about that vision, that little light, and it is a good memory. i didn't think i had a lot of them from my childhood, but now that i am trying to think of those things, they are coming back.
i had my own room and it was my refuge. another calming remembrance was the radio. for christmas one year i received one of those white plastic box radios. i thought this was a great thing! in those days it was only AM radio, and in norfolk there were two rock n' roll stations, WNOR and WGH. but there was a greater world out there, and i often waited until after i was sent to bed to surf the airwaves and discovered so many different radio stations from far away places. these were all 50,000 watt stations, and because they were at the top of the broadcast span for AM radio, their strong signals reached all across north america. one of my favorites was WKBW in buffalo, ny. at night they ran a serial called CHICKEN MAN ("he's everywhere! he's everywhere!) and i liked tuning in. it wasn't that the serial was so great, but that it was something different. i also remember hearing the song "They're Coming to Take Me Away (HAHA)" which was certainly not on the top 40 in norfolk! listening to the radio was another escape for me at night.
when i was in college, i did a radio project for one of my communications classes, and for that project i started at the low end of the spectrum of AM radio and mapped out where each signal came from on a united states map. i learned a lot about how radio waves travel, how they fade in and fade out. i would hang on, listening to commercials to identify the stations. what was really amazing to me was that i was able to pick up stations west of the mississippi river, and their call signals started with a K. this seemed amazingly far away from richmond, a whole world away. i was able to tune into hockey games from quebec and toronto, some of them being broadcast in french. at the low end of the am band was the booming radio cuba which you could pick up, day or night. it was the communist answer to radio free europe and it was all in spanish. i was able to pick up the usual strong signals: WOWO in ft. wayne, indiana; WLS in chicaago; WBZ in boston, WABC in new york city. when i first went to college in 1974 there was no FM radio. the first local station for that was in roanoke and it didn't happen until the end of that freshman year and you had to have a radio with both am and fm bands on it. my car radio did not have fm. often i would be out at night and pick up the stations mentioned above. they were the only choices, as all the am stations in that part of the state were low wattage and went off the air at sundown! having something end at sundown seems absurd today, considering everything is instantaneous. the two chicago stations were very clear, as was WOWO, and i used to enjoy tuning into them in the car late at night, and i especially enjoyed turning my friends on to the fact that they could find music after dark if they looked for it!
in 1970 my family went cross country to colorado to a dude ranch and on the return trip we stopped in chicago to visit my cousin who was in the navy there. i spent the visit in their kitchen with a portable radio scanning the waves and i was blown away to hear WRVA in chicago. i had not realized that it was a 50,000 watt station, and because i was in the center of the nation, i was able to pick up stations in kansas city and st. louis. all this was fascinating to me, and i asked my uncle teddy about the radio because he was a ham radio operator. he explained to me about skip, which is radio waves bouncing off the cloud cover. he told me that they were traveling better at night because there was no sun interference and that if it was cloudy, the signals would travel even further. with each bounce, a signal got weaker, so sometimes you would just get a brief piece of broadcasting, but enough to know that there was a whole different world and culture out there.
i am grateful for the am radios i had as a child. that white box radio was my step up from the tiny transistor radio that i first had, the one with the screw in antenna and single white earphone. the first time i ever heard the beatles was walking around our block to visit my friends and then suddenly there was "I Saw Her Standing There." i listened to it in the car on christmas day, a rare christmas when it was snowing heavily in norfolk and we were headed for my aunt and uncle's house for christmas breakfast. going over the lakewood bridge, i was listening to the local radio station talking about the snow, and this was exciting and scary as we headed over a very narrow two lane bridge.
my nighttime radio memories were not always rooted in faraway stations and rock and roll. i often spent the weekends with my grandmother, and she had a beat up old green portable battery radio and i sometimes listened to it at night after we went to bed. she always dropped off quickly and snored horribly. i would lay in the bed, wide awake, watching the street light change colors and then the oncoming traffic coming towards me, headlights making streaks through the blinds and across the far wall. over and over, people traveling in the dark, but the lines going nowhere. but then she got the radio, and it wasn't new. i think one of the boys at the naval base in her office gave it to her, maybe because he was shipping out and had no need of it. one saturday when she first got it we went downtown shopping, but returned late in the afternoon. she gave me a blanket to sit on, and i went out on the front lawn with the radio, almost like a picnic by myself, and watched the traffic and listened to the radio. i remember little green insects hopping on and off of it, and that the radio had some battery acid places on it where old batteries had leaked. but that night i went to bed ahead of my grandmother, and tuned in a easy listening hampton station, one with music that was jazz or 60's cheesy elevator music and for some strange reason that, too, was comforting. maybe because it was so different from rock and roll, maybe because it was all classical instrumental and quiet. i don't remember turning off the radio, but i know that i listened to that easy listening station more than a few times at her house, and it was part of my being safe and relaxed there.
a few times i went to sleep in my parents room and they had a radio in the headboard of the bed that was always tuned to WTAR am radio, which had a program called NIGHTRAIN and they played smooth 50's instrumental music, things like mantovani or orchestra music. no worda again. i didn't listen to that much, but i eventually appreciated it, as i was not allowed to change the station and i wasn't in there very often to go to sleep, only temporarily and on special occasions.
i suspect my attachment to all things musical comes from find it comforting in all ways. just looking at the blinking red light on that not so distant radio tower in norfolk was transporting to me. it led me to the airwaves and escape to faraway places that i wanted to go to, but was too afraid of going to. i didn't have to leave the comfort of my room or the places i felt safe. i just had to have a radio.
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