My Early Radios
Radio was a constant in my early childhood and teen years. I don’t have the old gear that I used to, but in trying to piece together old memories, I’ve searched the Internet for pictures of the now-vintage radios that I used to have.
The First Radio
I believe that it was Christmas Eve of 1970 when I received an AM radio as a gift from my eldest brother and his wife. I was just five years old. I don’t think I quite knew what to do with the device, but I remember listening to a station and hearing that Santa was being tracked by radar. He was just a short flight away in Colorado heading my direction. I thought that was awesome!
The radio that I received was a Midland hand-held AM radio. Mine was the gray-colored one like the one in the first picture. I’ve included the white model in the second picture because the image quality is a little better.
It took me a little while to get into the groove, but I began listening to local pop stations in Omaha and my native town Council Bluffs (Iowa). The best stations were
- 590 khz WOW (pop/rock/oldies)
- 1290 khz KOIL (pop/rock) “The Mighty 1290”
- 1560 khz KRCB (pop/rock) The “CB” stood for “Council Bluffs”
Music celebrities who worked somewhat briefly as disc jockeys at these stations included former Shindig host Jimmy O’Neill and well-known DJ Wolfman Jack.
It was through this little radio that I was introduced to the music and performances of artists including The Beatles (both as a group and individually), Elton John, Stevie Wonder, Elvis, The Beach Boys, The Doobie Brothers, Chicago, The Eagles, Cheech and Chong, The Rolling Stones, Charlie Daniels, The Allman Brothers, Edgar Winter, and many others.
No Static At All
My older brother gave me his Realtone portable AM/FM radio a year or so after I’d gotten the Midland radio.
He had gotten a stereo system that included an AM/FM receiver so he no longer needed his old radio. While I still largely listened to the AM dial, this was my first exposure to FM radio.
I remember before owning this radio that my brother and I had gone somewhere with our dad on a Saturday morning and I was able to listen to Scooby Doo cartoons on the radio. Due to an overlap of frequencies, the television audio for our local channel 6 station (which was then a CBS affiliate) could be heard on 88.7 mhz. Anyone around town could listen to the audio of TV channel 6 with an FM receiver. That changed in the mid-80’s when channel 6 became an NBC affiliate. Even decades after owning this radio, I remember listening to NBC comedies on the car FM radio. But, I digress…
Quirks
The Realtone was an interesting radio in that I don’t think the electrical system was very safe. If I had a 9-volt battery in it and I plugged it into a wall outlet, a dead or dying battery would charge up enough that I could listen by battery-power for another half hour or so. I didn’t do this very often. I’m probably lucky that this didn’t start a fire.
AM Listening
I listened to a number of the AM pop stations listed earlier on this radio. I used to listen to early episodes of Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 on Saturday evenings.
We had a locally produced show on WOW AM called Beatle Trivia that aired on Sunday evenings. After discovering the show, I didn’t miss an episode until the run ended. For more information on that program, please see Memories of Beatle Trivia.
FM Listening
I started listening to progressive rock station KQKQ FM (98.5 mhz) … “Rockin’ Stereo 98.” There were fewer commercial and longer songs … most of them with really good guitar jamming. We also had a local “oldies” station … 99.9 mhz KGOR (which still exists, today.)
On this little radio, there wasn’t a huge difference in listening to AM vs. listening to FM. Certainly, there was more clarity of sound, but with the mono speaker, there just wasn’t that much of a difference.
Multi-Band Adventures
I had been somewhat fascinated reading descriptions of multi-band radios in department store catalogs in my pre-teen years. For my thirteenth birthday, I had asked for a multi-band radio from what I think was the JC Penney catalog. The model I got was a Lloyd’s AM/FM/Weather/VHF Hi radio.
VHF Hi
The frequencies on VHF Hi allowed me to listen to aircraft conversations and NOAA weather broadcasts. I used to be able to manually tune in police and emergency broadcasts as well on the “public service” portion of the band. In addition to those, I heard a lot of noise that I suspect had to do with transmissions to pagers. Also, some radiotelephone conversations were broadcast in the clear on these frequencies.
I could also hear the audio from TV channel 7 … then an ABC affiliate … on this band.
Progression
I started listening to FM radio more frequently with this radio. In fact, I listened to FM radio almost exclusively. In addition to hearing some of the artists already mentioned, I regularly heard music from The Who, Foreigner, Black Sabbath, Fleetwood Mac, Boston, Jimi Hendrix, AC/DC, ELO, Styx, Nazareth, Pink Floyd, Santana, and Emerson, Lake, & Palmer.
Some syndicated programs began appearing on various stations. Chicken Man, The King Biscuit Flower Hour, Rockline, and Dr. Demento. One of the local stations played skits from The National Lampoon Radio Show for an entire weekend ( with SNL and Second City stars. )
A new rock station entered the FM scene in the late 90’s … 92.3 mhz KEZO / Z-92. This station had been an easy-listening station ( the “EZ” in the station call-letters ) but it switched to progressive and contemporary rock in the late 70’s and still has that format today. A couple of the DJ’s, Otis Twelve and Diver Dan Doomey created a number of original comedy shows, the first being Space Commander Wack and Stupid Larry. This was just a great show. You can still find episodes on iTunes and on some archive sites.
In another year, I got a stereo system that was just a simple record-player, radio, cassette deck. The sound was better and I finally could regularly listen to FM in stereo. That little Lloyd’s radio began to see infrequent use. I mainly used it when portability was something I needed.
I continued to use portable radios after the ones listed, including some I’ve bought in recent years. But, I’ll discuss those in a later post.