Transistor Radio Sparks a Lifetime of Memories

By John Addyman  |   john.addyman@yahoo.com

 

I’m sitting here looking at one of my old transistor radios. We’ve been through a lot together.

It’s got dried paint droplets on it, a lot of scratches and its antenna has seen better days.

The paint blotch is blue and it’s from a Sunday afternoon in Altamont, outside of Albany. I was painting the side of my house and in our small town that was enough to draw a crowd. Mayor Jim Caruso and his wife, Rosemary, brought lawn chairs and set them up so they wouldn’t miss a thing and could cheer me on. If memory serves, Rosemary brought a picnic lunch. Jim was a big eater.

To paint the house, I had to climb my 24-foot ladder. With my well-earned fear of heights, that meant adventure might ensure, which brought people over to our lawn to watch.

I found that listening to something engaging kept my mind off the fact that there was a lot of air under my feet while I was painting. I’m pretty sure I was listening to a baseball game because it was warm out — good painting weather.

While I was on the ladder, I got good advice from the Carusos — which bone surgeons were closest, how important it was to update my insurance, how far away the nearest hornets’ nest was and up-to-the minute data on how often homeowners hit the ground painting. Jim was an expert on statistics and data.

The little radio had a cord attached to it and I hung it on one of the rungs of the ladder, so it swung around while I was stroking the paint on.

I could only pick up AM radio stations on that little radio, but that was plenty.

We had moved to Altamont from the Philadelphia area, with our only daughter, Amy, in tow. She must have been 8 years old then. She missed her friends from back home and was trying to make new ones on her softball team, with me as the coach. There were summer nights that year when she would join me while I sat in the dark and listened to Phillies games broadcast from KYW 1060 AM in Philadelphia.

The Helderberg Mountains outside our town were perfectly capturing the radio signal from 300 miles away. When the signal faded and we couldn’t hear Harry Kalas or Rich Ashburn, Amy and I would talk about school and baseball and life in a very small town.

When I was growing up, AM radio was it. FM wasn’t common. We listened to Rock ‘n Roll on WARM 590 out of Scranton. In my senior year, someone’s voice on the radio changed a lot of us: that voice belonged to Chubby Checker.

My high school had a recreation room on the ground floor where you could go after lunch in the cafeteria and listen to music out of a juke box and dance — though very few of the guys did.

Old Chubby changed that with his record, “The Twist.” If you could wiggle enough to dry your bottom with a towel after a shower, you could do the twist.

And if you could twist, you got out on the dance floor … and chanced other dances. It was such a revolution that I remember a car full of guys on their way to a big football game on a Friday night and as soon as we heard Chubby’s voice coming out of the car’s speakers, the driver stopped the car in the Acme parking lot in Clarks Summit and we all piled out to dance right then and there. It was splendid.

When we moved to Newark in Wayne County from Connecticut, that old AM radio in my truck was so important. We’d snapped up our new house without selling the old one, so my wife and I commuted from Connecticut every weekend, bringing stuff with us we didn’t want the movers to hurt.

My wife and I would come home from work, pack her car and my truck and head for Newark — a six-hour drive. She worked for a bank, so she got on the road earlier than I did many times. She’d take the Thruway to the Chittenango rest stop, park there and take a nap, while I was a good 100 miles behind her.

Those were dark, lonely trips for me and the saving grace was my truck had a good radio and I could pick up baseball games in the summer and football games in the fall. We moved in on Halloween. Because of the distance, I’d listen to one station until it faded, pick up another one and kept at it until I got to Chittenango, found my wife’s car, gave her a kiss and we went on to Newark together in our own little caravan.

And on one memorable night, while we were sleeping on the floor of our new bedroom, we got visited by bats. As tired as we both were, we moved pretty quick that night.

I pulled out one of my younger transistor radios this summer so I could listen to something while I washed my car under our Sycamore tree. I found a lot of talk shows and decided on one of them that was covering local issues. I tend to talk to myself when I wash my car, so what I was doing blended right in with the talk show.

When I got done, the radio had bird poop on it.

Yes, my little radios and I have been through a lot together.