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.
When I was a kid … ten or eleven years old … I happened upon a local AM radio talk show called Beatles Trivia. It aired Sunday nights at 10:30 p.m. I was a burgeoning Beatles fan, having “discovered” them in the mid-70’s.
The show began as a 5-minute segment during the 7:00 p.m. to midnight “Hall of Fame Show” on Omaha’s WOW AM radio (590 on the AM dial.) By the time I happened upon it, the show ran for about an hour.
I saw in the online Wall Street Journal that Radio Shack is preparing to file for bankruptcy:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/radioshack-prepares-bankruptcy-filing-1421279360
I had read a blog post eulogizing the store from a former employee several weeks ago. I ended up on the Radio Shack Catalogs site:
http://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/
…poring over old catalogs, looking at all of the gear that I’d purchased throughout my childhood and through the early years of my adult life. Reminiscing brought back some good memories.
When I was a kid, I was fascinated by crystal radios. The first one I had was in the form of a backpack for the Six Million Dollar Man action figure ( Mom picked up the crystal set at some kind of sale before I ever had the action figure ).
The thing that fascinated me about crystal radios was that they required no external power-source; the radio signals themselves were strong enough to power a small earpiece at an acceptable volume.