It’s 1966 in Redfield, New York (Population: 400). My mother is fourteen years old, and she’s listening to the radio. The radio is both a comfort and a thrill; it’s there to keep her company and give her a glimpse into the world outside of upstate New York dairy farms. Sometimes, at night, listening to her transistor radio tucked under her pillow, she hears the music coming in from stations in Chicago and Detroit and delights in listening to songs no one else she knows has heard yet.
Songs take a while to get to Redfield in 1966. Take “Eleanor Rigby,” which my mother is hearing for the first time. Ah, look at all the lonely people… The strings and the harmonies and the lyrics suit her mood perfectly. She has felt lonely many, many times, but she’s never heard a song on the radio talking about loneliness, about other lonely people, and from the Beatles, too! Her favorite Beatles song has been “Ticket to Ride,” but she doesn’t have a ticket to ride right now. She has very little control over anything in her life. Loneliness, living in a dream, waiting at the window, darning socks…these are things she knows well and someone else, her favorite Beatle, Paul McCartney, no less, knows them too and wrote a song about them and now it’s playing on the radio in between songs about love and romance and freedom.
The radio is both a comfort and a thrill; it’s there to keep her company and give her a glimpse into the world outside of upstate New York dairy farms.
Before the song is even over, she starts pleading. “This song is so good. THIS SONG IS SO GOOD. I hope they play it again. Please please please please let them play this song again…”
The deliciously maudlin flourish of strings fade and dead air takes over. She keeps her ear to the speaker, waiting waiting waiting. After a few seconds — an eternity on the radio — the flustered DJ comes on and says, breathlessly, right in her ear, “Wow! What a good song! You know what, I liked that song so much that I’m going to play it again!”
Ah, look at all the lonely people…
My mother jumps out of bed. It worked. The radio has granted her wish. She is powerful and in control and intimately connected to this DJ, who is also alone and, possibly, lonely.
***
My father started out making recordings in his bedroom in Lexington, Massachusetts, imitating the DJs on the radio: Arnie “Woo Woo” Ginsberg, Juicy Brucie Bradley. He went on to get a degree in Radio Production at Syracuse University, where he (1) met my mother and (2) became a DJ on his college station and, eventually, three different New Hampshire Top 40 radio stations in the ’70s and ’80s.
My father’s mother had a very thick Boston accent, and eventually it occurred to me to wonder why he didn’t have one as well. His radio voice was always smooth and formal, and his regular voice is only slightly less so, with nary an accent to be heard. “I did have that accent!” he told me when I finally thought to ask. “I worked hard to get rid of it; there was no way I could be on the radio with that kind of voice.” I wish the recordings he made of himself as a kid pretending to be a DJ were still around; I’d love to be able to hear my father dropping his rs and honking out big, broad as.
He had the night shift for the first few years of my childhood, which meant he slept for much of the time I was awake. I’d listen to him before I went to bed on WGIR, the Top 40 station of Manchester, New Hampshire, cuing up “Night Fever” by the Bee Gees or “Don’t Go Breakin’ My Heart” by Elton John and Kiki Dee and reading advertisements for the Mai Kai Restaurant and Chalifour’s Flowers. Sometimes I’d feel shy when he’d wake up for dinner, suddenly nervous to have to talk back to the man I spent so much time just listening to.
Years later, when my father was no longer a DJ and I was starting seventh grade in Swanzey, New Hampshire, my English teacher looked up at me after she read my name on the first day of school and asked if anyone I was related to was ever “a DJ on the radio.” Baffled, I told her that my father was, and she actually let out a tiny squeal. She was from Manchester, and she used to spend hours listening to my father on the radio with her sister, calling in to request songs. “Ask your father if he remembers Kathy and Susan! Oh my God!”
She was actually blushing. She had announced her first name to the entire class, something teachers never did, as well as the fact that she was a kid at some point and she had a crush on my father. I was mortified. But slightly pleased and proud, too.
***
I love listening to the radio. I’m not talking about satellite radio, when you pick a station that is tailored to specific listening tastes via algorithms, or “radio stations” created via Pandora or Spotify, which use personal data and your own musical history to present you with a nearly flawless selection of songs — though I love those types of radio, too. What I’m talking about is taking what you’re given when you’re listening to the radio, for better or for worse. I love that serendipity. I love putting up with half an hour of dreck to be rewarded with one perfect song, my song, showing up and making my day.
When I was a kid, I loved staying up until eleven on school nights to hear the end of the Top 10 at 10 on WKNE out of Keene, New Hampshire, my radio tucked under my pillow so my parents wouldn’t know that I was awake and listening to the radio. I loved following along with the dedications on the Top 10 at 10, hearing someone named Kristie’s dedications to someone named Brad go from “How Will I Know” by Whitney Houston to “Secret Lovers” by Midnight Starr to “Take My Breath Away” by Berlin to “On My Own” by Patti Labelle and Michael McDonald, all in the course of a month — I knew nothing else about Kristie and Brad, but thanks to the Top 10 at 10, they were my own soap opera to obsess over as I drifted off to sleep. Sometimes I would make dedications to friends and crushes, but I’d always use my initials, “KC,” too shy to really join in the drama and proclaim my feelings via song for the whole world to hear.
I miss the ritual of taping songs off the radio: looking for a fresh blank tape, Scotch-taping over the holes along the top to render it able to record again, and situating myself in front of the radio, waiting waiting waiting for the DJ to play my favorite songs.
I miss the ritual of taping songs off the radio: looking for a fresh blank tape, not finding one and having to choose which cassette to sacrifice to the cause, Scotch-taping over the holes along the top to render it able to record again, and situating myself in front of the radio, waiting waiting waiting for the DJ to play my favorite songs so I could record them to listen to later. Patience and choosiness was key—there was only a certain amount of space on each cassette and I wanted to fill it up with the songs I liked most. After an hour of mediocre offerings, it was easy to get discouraged and start settling. “Well, this one’s pretty good,” I might think as “All I Need is a Miracle” by Mike + the Mechanics started up, not realizing that the DJ was finally going to play “Papa Don’t Preach” right after, but now the tape was used up and there was no way my parents were going to get me “True Blue” for my birthday because Madonna was singing about sex and teen pregnancy and now I had to decide if I was going to rewind, tape over “All I Need is a Miracle” and miss the first verse of “Papa Don’t Preach,” or quickly flip the tape over, only missing a few seconds of “Papa Don’t Preach” but taping over “Word Up!” by Cameo, which I liked almost as much and they don’t play it on the radio as often, so who knew when I’d get a chance to tape it again?! There was also the issue of the DJ talking over the first part of the song, often right up to the second the singing began. “Papa Don’t Preach” had an especially long introduction and controversial subject matter about which certain DJs liked to make winky little comments, so it was especially difficult to get a clean copy of that one.
It was important to know songs’ idiosyncrasies in order to get the best possible recordings. I was playing Monopoly with my neighbor Amy in her room while she taped songs off the radio one Saturday afternoon; we were listening to WKNE, as usual, and at one point, churchy organ music started up. We looked at each other, puzzled…was it a commercial? What was happening? Suddenly, the organ drone ended, replaced by the unmistakable, spritely guitar intro to “Faith” by George Michael. We screamed. Amy jumped up and ran over to her boom box to push record, but she had missed the guitar intro as well as the song’s first saucy line: Well I guess it would be nice…if I could touch your body… We had never heard the extended “church music” introduction to the song before and had no idea it was a prelude to one of our radio favorites. After that, I was careful to listen for “church music” while taping off the radio so I’d be ready to record “Faith” for my very own.
***
At the School Show — an annual tradition at my elementary school — we would all stand on a set of bleachers onstage at the local high school and sing songs. Classes would come down to the front of the stage and perform together, sometimes with simple dance steps and hand motions, and there were group songs and solos for which the music teacher held cutthroat auditions, as well as a big dance number that was generally the highlight of the show — unless there was a breakout solo performance from an especially good singer or particularly hammy performer.
When I was in fifth grade, the theme was the music of the ’50s, and my class in particular responded enthusiastically and embraced the era for our own. I’m not sure if this was because of the ’70s version of the ’50s that most of us knew and loved via Grease and reruns of “Laverne and Shirley” and “Happy Days,” or the fact that the songs were often about the fun of being a teenager and we were closing in on being teenagers, but whatever the reason, we became obsessed. We started dressing in greaser outfits and poodle skirts that we were supposed to save as costumes for the show, we practiced the Jitterbug and the Stroll at recess, and we became devoted listeners to Jukebox Saturday Night, a syndicated radio program that played on WKNE.
Like the Top 10 at 10, Jukebox Saturday Night was a request and dedication show, but all of the songs were from the ’50s and early ’60s. My parents were big fans, and we’d often spend Saturday nights listening together in the living room while we played games, read, or chatted. It turned out that other kids came from Jukebox Saturday Night families as well, and word about the radio show that played the original versions of the songs we’d learned for our School Show spread throughout my class. The host must have been baffled as to why a bunch of 10- and 11-year olds were suddenly calling in to dedicate “Peggy Sue” and “Sh-Boom” for one another. Along with six other girls I had been selected for a group song, “Moments to Remember,” a song I had never heard before. I called Jukebox Saturday Night to dedicate it my fellow singers. When the finally song came on, I was surprised to hear that it was sung by a group called The Four Lads—boys! I had just assumed that we were singing a song by girls. Shocked, I listened extra closely to the lyrics about life in the ’50s: tearing the goal post down, winning ballroom prizes, and going to the drive-in movie “but somehow never watching the show.”
For the first time in my life, I was experiencing nostalgia. It was a sort of false, misplaced nostalgia, of course, as it was brought on by a song about the joy of being a white teenaged boy in the 1950s. I was not yet a teenager, and I would never be a boy in the 1950s, but pressed up close to the speaker, I felt the song to my core and found myself drawn in by the promise of one day not only having good times but looking back on the good times later. I didn’t know the word “nostalgia,” but the radio was teaching me what it was anyway, making me aware that time passed and one day, I would have my own moments to remember.
***
I meet up with my old friend on Christmas Eve. We’ve known each other for over twenty years, and we originally met because we both had radio shows on our high school’s radio station that barely broadcast to the end of the block. High-school style, he has borrowed his parents’ car to pick me up from work so we can go get a burger and talk. His parents’ car doesn’t have an iPod adapter, and we no longer carry around tapes or CDs, so we listen to the radio instead.
This is a throwback to when we first knew each other; when we would aimlessly drive around in my parents’ car with five other people and a broken tape deck, furiously smoking and flailing and yelling over each other, forced to listen to whatever radio stations we could pick up in very rural Northfield, Massachusetts. One hot June day, days before our high school graduation, we skipped school to go swimming. The radio would only pick up an oldies station, and it played “V-A-C-A-T-I-O-N,” an aggressively wholesome ode to summer vacation sung by Connie Francis with lyrics like We’re gonna…grab a bite at the pizza stand / Writin’ love letters in the sand! and We’re gonna…mashed potato to a jukebox tune / park your car ‘neath an August moon!
We all groaned: so cheesy! My love of ’50s and ’60s music and the glimpse it gave my fifth-grade self of what it would be like to be a teenager hadn’t lasted into my actual teenage years. Those songs now seemed too innocent, too goofy, too old. Connie Francis doesn’t show up on the radio so much these days; she’s too old even for the oldies station. But as the song twinkled on, we went from singing lyrics like the weather’s warm but we’ll play it cool! and V-A-C-A-T-I-O-N! And the world is ours! with less sarcasm and more glee until we were happily yelling out the lyrics, our fists raised in victory. It’s hard to resist a bouncy, shiny song about the cliché of being young and free in the summer sun when you actually are young and free in the summer sun.
I’m always going to love driving around and listening to the radio, hoping for good stuff, getting a mixed bag, waiting waiting waiting for my song, the perfect song, to come up next.
Twenty years later, here we are again, driving around in my friend’s parents’ car listening to the radio. We tune it to Emerson College radio, but we don’t pay much attention to the music, as we haven’t seen each other in years and have a lot to discuss. We aren’t smoking, yelling, singing, and laughing anymore; things get serious quickly—somehow, we’ve become people who are personally acquainted with heartbreak, disillusionment, bad jobs, money problems, bad backs, death, on and on and on. How did we get here? Who are we?
We’re reassuring each other that we still look great when the neglected radio makes itself known with an abrasive sound collage suddenly creaking and belching out of the speaker: George Bush making fart jokes; Martha Stewart describing a recipe for road-kill stew; garbled psychedelic guitars screeching over more fart jokes; a children’s story about going to the moon interspersed with swears, sex noises, and animal sounds—just about the most college radio thing I’ve ever heard. We start laughing, and get practically hysterical when the deadpan DJ finally figures out how to turn the mic back on and informs us we’ve just heard selections from “the one and only Wayne Butane” from his 2004 album “Wayne Butane Sucks Big Time.” Wayne Butane is probably not going to grow on me, Connie Francis-style, but now I’m never going to forget him. I’m always going to love driving around and listening to the radio, hoping for good stuff, getting a mixed bag, waiting waiting waiting for my song, the perfect song, to come up next.
This is so, so lovely. I’ll just be over here, having my own nostalgia moment, but I do want to know … did your father remember Kathy and Susan?
Karen here…thank you! HE DID REMEMBER THEM! He was, I think, embarrassed and pleased, like me.
I was so going to ask that! Thanks.
KAREN, THIS IS SO GOOD, KAREN AAAH
This hit SO CLOSE to home for me. My dad was never a DJ on a mainstream radio station, but it was his telling me that he was a college DJ that got me to do the same. Those were two and a half of the best years at school, picking songs and live-censoring ones with bad words and hoping that the FCC wasn’t listening should I miss one.
I have satellite radio and a USB hookup in my car now, but every so often I’ll switch over to WAXQ and listen to the DJs there, people who have been in the business longer than I’ve been alive, play songs I too have misplaced nostalgia for.
(Side note, have you ever read Carol Miller’s book? It is so very good, especially the perspective of a female DJ that’s been in the industry for quite some time. http://www.amazon.com/Up-All-Night-Times-Radio/dp…
Thank you, love! I haven’t, amazingly! Putting in on my list!
Oh, I love this so much.
Also I’ll have you know, when I hear those organ strains from the beginning of “Faith”, the song starts, warbles slightly from where a tentative finger started hitting the Pause button, but then gets going, only to cut off at “from that emooootioon” & suddenly turns into the bridge from Cutting Crew’s “I Just Died in Your Arms Tonight”
I loved radio more as a kid. By the time I was a teen there was VERY little variety– you could tell what time it was by which songs were playing– & DJs talked over the start & end of songs. Morning DJs were almost universally sexist, racist, & homophobic. But despite this sometimes songs still blistered their way across the airwaves & jolted me. I’ll never forget the first time I heard White Zombie. I eagerly anticipated more music like theirs. It didn’t really come. Overtly political bands like Rage Against the Machine & System of a Down also changed my way of thinking & looking at life. It was stunning to hear them played on the same stations that regularly mocked the people their songs were about.
The thing with DJs talking over the beginnings and endings of songs irritates me no end. And they don’t even give useful information! Just blabbing on about celebrity gossip or whatever. Give us information about the music, folks! And then stop talking the instant before the song comes on. It’s a skill and I remember being impressed when DJs did it flawlessly. Most of the modern DJs I’ve heard are complete crap.
This is SO PERFECT. My dad was a college radio DJ, too, and had a lovely record collection that introduced me to a much wider range of music than my mom’s exclusively country records (though those were cool too). And I love how you describe the scramble to find a tape when That Song comes on, debating whether to try again because you missed the first line, or to keep an imperfect copy because then you have it…. Wow. I’ve been in a foul temper today, the nostalgia hit was exactly what I needed. Thank you!
This seems like the appropriate place to once again mourn the lost of Boston radio station WFNX. The Emerson station is good, but sigh, it is not FNX.
I never had the experience of rushing to tape a song of the radio, but even today I love the unpredictability of it, the feeling that you’re at the mercy of the DJ. Satellite and Pandora give me some of the same feelings, but there’s just something so special about the radio that I can’t quite put my finger on.
I miss FNX soooooooo much. I spent so much time in high school, listening to Alter Ego while doing homework after dinner, or listening to it with my best friend over the phone. If I’d been the right age to tape songs off the radio I absolutely would have (instead of running straight to Limewire to find them after they’d been aired)
Last week I was trying to figure out a comprehensive list of the concerts I’ve been to, but there’s too many free summer shows held by FNX that have been lost to the mists of time.
I also miss FNX a ton. However, it gives me great pleasure to hear Henry Santoro (the morning news guy on FNX for YEARS) doing the midday hosting on WGBH. It keeps some of that era alive for me.
YES, I was in Boston a few weeks ago, driving around and listening to the radio, and heard him unexpectedly and felt so happy. Weirdly, I was on the FNX morning show once and met him; he was, of course, very nice!
I still mourn the loss of WBCN. There was no morning show! You could actually hear music in the mornings!
I’ve heard that “Radio Free Boston” is a good read but the death of good radio stations just makes me so mad I know I’d have a hard time getting through it!
when that made it out to the ‘burbs I loved it!
When I was a kid in the Twin Cities there were two (two!) kids-specific radio stations; I was a Radio AAHS devotee and looked down my nose at those Radio Disney corporate plebs. Radio AAHS (which until about 10 seconds ago I thought was spelled Radio Oz) was the only thing my little alarm clock radio was set to the entirety of my elementary schooling; I’d wake up to it in the morning and listen to it before bed at night.
oh gosh clock radios, that was a whole nother THING, they could set the tone for your day (IDEALLY they would be announcing that due to a surprise overnight snowfall, school is closed). And annoying/offensive morning shows ruined them, because waking up at 6AM to their jokes was just the woooorrrrst.
clock radios, yes. Hey Jude and Let It Be while I brushed my teeth got me through the last year of high school.
I JUST LOVE THIS. Augh! My CHILDHOOD.
oh man this reminded me of the time when I was…7 or 8? and my mom decided to take me to the local country station for a tour (WMZQ!). I had this mental image of a big fancy downtown office building and all the DJs wearing suits, and yet I was not disappointed by the reality.
it also made so many songs pop into my head; there are SO MANY songs about radio and DJs! and movies, and books…I know the Toast has many Signal to Noise fans, that one definitely came to mind while I was reading this.
of course I both miss and don’t miss the randomness of radio songs, and the precariousness of taping songs off the radio….but I’m kind of excited to see what the Kids These Days will feel nostalgic for, music-wise. What’s their equivalent of the excitement of a shiny new pack of unopened 90-minute cassettes, or the weird nostalgia of finding a years-old recorded one?
Ah, nights of my youth…staying up late. waaaaay late, with my tape recorder and cassette, listening to Brave New Waves on CBC…
oh god.
I’ll be over in a corner batting away feelings if anyone needs me.
When the internet first was A Thing, the thing I was most excited about was the possibility of using it to listen to radio from other places, strange local radio from exotic locales, radio in other languages. Like shortwave only more.
Radio-locator.com became my friend. It was thrilling to find dedicated Old Time Radio streams, or the old Club Asia station that used to broadcast out of London, that introduced me to bhangra. It was irksome to find that French radio played mostly the same garbage music as American radio. I can now tune in to my old college radio station even though I’ve moved away from there. I can tune in to stations in places where major news events are happening to get the local feel of it and the local take on things. I’m torn whether to give my NPR money to KCRW (my love) or WBEZ (my local)–what a luxurious problem to have!
It is, sadly, not as much fun now that radio stations in places like the UK (I’m looking at you, BBC) and Japan will take note of your IP address and tell you “this content is not available in your location”–and I haven’t yet figured out how to spoof IP addresses or set up a VPN just to listen to some fucking radio.
Wait, what? Since when does the BBC do this?
I always thought this image should include scotch tape!
My parents were the coolest – they totally bought True Blue for me. Dad also hooked everything up so I could make mixed tapes from the radio, records, other cassettes and 8-tracks all from one setup. The records and 8-tracks were originally all theirs (they had everything from ABBA to Black Sabbath to K-Tel’s “Silly Songs”) but then we started going to yard sales every summer weekend and I amassed my own collection.
And now I can’t play music without the internet!
My parents are young enough to have bought True Blue for themselves!
oh, the memories! I taped at least three different versions of the Titanic song where they put in lines from the movie.
My dad was also a DJ for a while; he started out as a high schooler and finally left 20 years later when I was in middle school. Most of my radio nostalgia comes from him, really – listening to him on the radio, going with him to work, all that.
There’s something about the radio that I miss tremendously and so this piece just really grabs that. (Even though I was never one to tape songs.)
Emerson radio was exactly what I was thinking of when I started reading! They’re fun to listen to, especially when the college kids make lame jokes and flub artist titles (but I mean that in the most loving way possible). The station has introduced me to a lot of new music in a way that Spotify or Pandora wouldn’t have.
This brings back so many memories. I remember taping songs off the radio. I remember my (short lived because I only did it because this cute guy asked me to, not because I actually wanted to) new music show on my college radio station.
Oh, this was so so lovely. Lovely job capturing the emotional resonance of radio.
I grew up with Detroit radio, and still know exactly at which mile-marker on the drive back home I’ll start picking up the stations. Spotify playlists get switched off then, and I crank up the radio and pretend I’m 17 again, driving my parent’s car.
Karen, I loved this article! I studied abroad in Senegal a couple years back and ended up doing my end-of-term project on the importance of the radio to the Senegalese people. For most of them, it was the only reliable news source they had and it was BETTER that way. Ever since then I’ve been obsessed with making the radio as important to me as it is to them. (Shout out to WTMD in Baltimore for helping with that)
My dad’s number one regret in life is that he didn’t become the radio DJ he had always dreamed of becoming. I try to keep my addiction to public broadcasting strong so that one day, when he finally decides it’s never too late, I’ll hear his voice over the speaker.
Thanks for this, it’s obviously got me feelin’ all the feels !
Aw, that’s amazing, thank YOU! Please let your dad know the money and hours are TERRIBLE, so there’s that. Eh, don’t pass any bad news along…
What a wonderful piece. Radio is such a great medium; it creates feelings and atmosphere in a way television or the internet never will, in my opinion.
I remember calling in to my local radio statiom requesting Meredith Brooks’ “Bitch”, and the radio DJ (a woman in her 30s) didn’t say anything at the time but later went on air to announce the incongruity of a little, cute-voiced girl saying the song’s title. I was 9…
Ohhhhhhh man I’ve been feeling a whole lot of nostalgia lately for my eighth-grade boyfriend, whom I had a crush on for two years before we went out, so he of course inspired many radio mixtapes. Every song on them was a sappy, melodramatic alternaballad of the new millennium (think Coldplay’s Yellow, or Lifetime’s Hanging By A Moment). Alas, I never gave them to him as a token of my affection; I just listened to them while writing screeds to him in my journal. I don’t think I’ve ever felt anything as intensely as my middle-school crushes.
I need to see if I can recreate those playlists.
When was in college in the early 90s, dorm rooms had a phone connected to the wall, no voicemail, and nobody had cell phones at school. So if you wanted to talk to someone and the line was already engaged, you were kinda SOL.
Most of my social group listened to the oldies station, and we eventually figured out that the request lines were pretty slow after 9:00 or 9:30, so we could either call up and chat with the overnight DJ if we were just bored, or ask for a dedication to the person we wanted to talk to, and then that person would call us when they/their roommate got off the phone. I had forgotten about that until today, thank you.
What a wonderful remembrance from someone who listens and remembers in more ways than one. Great job, Karen! You echo and amplify the experiences of your kindred spirits riding the radio waves. Me included!
Love, Mom
Thank you, Mom! <3
So, so good. I felt my fingers itching over the pause and record buttons, trying to get the first full “AhoooOOOOOOoooo” of The Breeders’ “Cannonball” and just missing it all over again. And running home from the bus stop to hear the stupid After the Fire English-language version of “Der Kommisar” every day. Still love radio but it’s definitely not the same.
Holding cassette tape recorders up to the radio speaker–I remember! Love this article so much.
Very nice K.
We are uniquely blessed in my area with a local station (really – locally owned, locally run as far as I can tell) with a really nice person for AM DJ, and the rest of the lineup is also great. They do interesting things for Black History Month and Women’s History Month. Me only serious complaint is too much Rolling Stones.. And Beatles. Otherwise they play a lot of new stuff, and some old stuff, and nothing too popular, and nothing too often. I lurve them. WRSI
And then I realized I used to listen to them when they were up in Greenfield instead of down in Hamp, and Buddy Rubbish did Friday night Oldies all requests – nothing younger than 1966… AND you could phone in, or you could drive down an alley called Memory Lane and they would lower a microphone down to the car, and you’d banter, and request a song and drive away again. It was so excellent.
I’ll be over here, all verklempt.
Several of my friends grew up listening to Buddy Rubbish, and I almost died of happiness/jealousy when they told me about Memory Lane!
brb gotta go listen to “Are You Out There?” for the symmetry.
brb gotta go listen to "Are You Out There?" for the symmetry.
Between this essay and the post office essay earlier this week, The Toast is feeling very cozy and nostalgic this week.
The small town where I grew up still has a pretty good college radio station, and a few others within tuning range. I dig it when I’m home visiting the family. One of them used to play “The Boy with the Arab Strap” by Belle and Sebastian constantly, for some reason. I used to go with a friend of mine, who DJed her own metal show, to another one sometimes and she would let me read the PSAs on the air.
If you enjoyed this essay, pick up Sarah Vowell’s Radio On, also.
Huge Radio On fan, which I learned existed BECAUSE this story was originally called Radio On!!! Someone in my writing class told me SV’s book already existed, and then I read it and loved it.
I also miss FNX a ton. However, it gives me great pleasure to hear Henry Santoro (the morning news guy on FNX for YEARS) doing the midday hosting on WGBH. It keeps some of that era alive for me.
Thank you. I am around the same age as you. I had the same love affair with radio. So much so, I went to the local station at age 15 and started as an intern. I had to get permission to start working as an employee at an early age.
It remains the most amazing time of my life. I have been wanting to get back to radio ever since, but, life and consolidation intervened.
Thank you again.
This article describes me to a tee!!! Thoroughly enjoyed reading it and remembering…..*sigh*