It is fitting for a trip post to mention radio. Afterall, you can’t watch movies or TV while driving….or at least you better not! I like a good movie or TV show as much as the next guy….but radio, that is something special. I truly adore radio. Of course if you have read prior posts or know me you know I like radios….but I mean radio programming. Sure, music of course. But beyond music or news….real radio. Radio Shows! Stuff that can entertain and enlighten and spark imaginative thoughts just like a good book. It engages the mind as an active participant in the show rather than a passive one….as a result it has been called the theater of the mind, and with good reason.
I am too young to have heard Molly say, “T-ain’t funny, McGee.” on a live broadcast but I am old enough to remember hearing reruns of shows late at night on our local station when I was a kid…Fibber’s closet crashing down, the sinister laugh of The Shadow telling us that he knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men, Jack Benny’s horrible violin practice, the sharp rifle crack and horses galloping away into many a western adventure, etc. ….later they began playing them on special nostalgia shows (“When Radio Was” for example) and The Yesterday USA Radio Network still offers programming 24/7 via volunteer DJ’s who share old shows from their collections. You can find them at www.yesterdayusa.com
At the age of 12, my parents gave me a set of old radio shows on tape and a restored 1948 General Electric table radio. (see photo at top) I still have the set and the old GE. I played the shows to death. Luckily I have made copies and expanded the collection. This was a gift that kept on giving. It greatly expanded my love of radio shows and old music and the restored GE taught me something even beyond the technical nature of it……It came from a shop that used to be in Bellaire, TX that was called “Antique Audio” …I still remember the old brick building and the door that was painted to look like an old radio. It was, for a while, one of my favorite shops to visit and hang out at. Aside from expanding upon my technical knowledge I learned something very important–I learned that one could actually make a living by collecting and restoring antique technology!
The shows?….yes, I still love to listen to them. I later obtained an old Gates studio turntable and began copying and encoding old shows from the original 16″ Transcription discs. I now have about 16,000 of them….including all the known surviving episodes of Fibber McGee and Molly. (My wife may accuse me of having Fibber’s closet too.) It is an audio collection that I’d take to Mars or anywhere else that I must go and thanks to modern technology I can fit this collection into a pocket.
In order to listen to them at home, I could just play them from my computer–but that’s boring, anyone could do that. Instead, I play them into a home-built AM transmitter and tune them in on an old radio. Ramsey electronics sells a great little AM transmitter kit that is stable (uses a Phase Locked Loop circuit in the oscillator) and of suitable audio quality–it also lends itself to a variety of modifications to improve upon its performance….but even in stock form, it will perform this function very well. If you go this route, you will soon find that Jack Benny’s intentionally horrific violin efforts seem more enjoyable through the wood cased speaker of your favorite pre-war radio than they ever could out of the plastic box of your computer. But listen however you can, as these shows are a treasure worthy of being enjoyed again and again.
Traveling today, when you get in the car and sweep the dial there are more stations than ever….and yet unless you are using a satellite subscription service there is also less variety. So many stations, once with individualistic sounds and local programs, have been bought out by large media companies and now play the same syndicated talk shows with blathering angry idiots of one stripe or another interspersed with commercials trying to peddle various bits of schlock to the scattered masses….often by trying to frighten the public into parting with their hard earned money….No, thanks.
Jean Shepherd was correct when he spoke of the amazing act of spinning a grapefruit sized glowing dial on a big Zenith console and hearing voices from far away lands and then lamenting the modern plastic piss-pot radios that can barely pick up a station across town, let alone across the country…and as he put it, why should they?…they all sound alike now anyway. He was mostly correct in his assessment, but thankfully not entirely correct. We still have some individual sounding choices–they are just fewer and farther between and usually of lower power….but they are there for the patient listener who will scan the dial and adjust their antenna to discover them. And of course, now we can download free podcasts to play back later…not quite the same, but certainly a good option when traveling. While traveling, apps such as “Radio Radar” make a good aid to locate what you want to hear…you can customize it to show what you want and within a specified radius of where you happen to be at the time….then just tune your radio to it.
In remote areas with no broadcast coverage at all, we have our chosen music on CDs and mp3 for use in our truck. Most people do this. Our vehicle, however, is too old to have blue-tooth connectivity and too new for a tape deck to use an adapter with……so…what we found, for about 70 bucks, is a nifty little FM transmitter that plugs into the lighter and not only can transmit the mp3 music and shows from the phone or player but also can charge the phone at the same time! Even better, this one is compatible enough with the phone to not need the second audio cable–all charging and audio are carried through the regular USB cable so it results in a more tidy setup with less to tangle up in the car. I’ve been using this for a few months now and it is one of the better car toys that I have bought.
So, armed with an assortment of CDs, mp3 music files, downloaded podcasts, and some 10,000+ hours of old radio shows and vintage news broadcasts and a couple of transmitter options to play them through the truck system or a vintage radio in the trailer we should have plenty to enjoy hearing even with the possibility of weeks or months of driving in areas that are devoid of anything worth listening to.