WATCHIN THE RADIO

When I was a kid,
and other boring stuff.
Back in 47 I think it was, my dad bought mom a radio for Christmas. Now understand that this was no ordernary radio, it was a
CONSOLE RADIO WITH ATTACHED 78 RPM RECORD PLAYER AND AN OVERSEAS BAND WITH PUSH BUTTONS.....
Dad got mom out of the house and two of my uncles carried it up the steps on the front porch and sat it in the living room and covered it with a quilt. Mom and dad came back in and mom seen the quilt with the red bow on top and started to cry. She slid the quilt off the radio and cried some more and gave dad a big hug and thanked him. This is what she had been wanting for a long time.
This was a ''combination radio'' with ''overseas band'' with six push buttons that you could pre set stations you liked to listen to. This thing also had a ''AUTOMATIC 78 R.P.M. Record player'' and you could stack ten records on the spindle and it would automatically drop and play the records and when the last one played, it turned its self off. God the wonders of the engineering back then.


The console was about four feet long and two feet thick and it had a ''tip up top'' It had a 12 inch speaker in the front covered with cloth and it had a imitation gold grill over the cloth. Mom said it was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. All the wood was a walnut veneer and shined like new money.


Back then 78 records were four for a dollar at Sears and dad had bough her a nice stack of records. Mom started crying again.....
special note here........ We already had a ''kitchen radio'' a little radio about the size of a lunch box made from Bakelite plastic and it was cracked in several places and held together with scotch tape. You had to turn it on with a pair of pliers and change the stations the same way. The ''dial'' had long since been lost.


I'll tell you about the gifts that year because I think that was the year that ''Santa'' brought me the Lionel train but that is another story for later.


This was a wonderful Christmas and mom and dad would play records and dance in the living room and sometimes mom would sit and polish the radio and sometimes she would ''cry for happy''........
Back then you ''watched'' the radio. Yep, you ''watched the radio'' while your favorite program was on the air. Radio programs were listed in the news paper just like TV listings are now. For those of you that remember there was ….....
OUR MISS BROOKS.......
AMOS AND ANDY.... (two white guys)
THE CREAKING DOOR (Boras Carloff)
THE FAT MAN..... a detective show
GANG BUSTERS..... a cops show
THE HIT PARADE … popular music …
BIG JOHN AND SPARKIE … .kiddie show on Saturday morning...
THE LONE RANGER........ you know....
SGT. PRESTON AND YUKON KING. A mountie and his dog
SKY KING........ another adventure kiddie show
LUMB AND ABNER..... comedy
WCKY, CINCINATTI ONE ,,,,,, OHIO.......
THE GRAND OLE OPARY FROM NASHVILLE TENESEA.....

and on Sunday, The Greatest Story Ever Told. Wonderful show.....
There were tons more but you get the idea. The programs were on a regular schedule and mom sat the buttons for the programs she liked.
In the winter time especially we would listen to the radio. In the fall of the year we would walk the woods and pick up hickory nuts. Often time we would have several gunny sacks full and dad would crack the on the flat iron with his carpenters hammer. We would put a double hand full off cracked nuts in a large paper sack and shake them. This would go a long way at dislodging the goodies and the rest we would pick out with a flattened 8d nail. Life was good back then. We were a family with me and mom and dad and Grannie Cecil and my uncle Harry all living in a 3 bedroom house with no running water, central heating, air conditioning, indoor plumbing, storm windows, storm doors and a lot more other ''THINGS'' but we had a family and we had good food that mom ''canned''' in the fall and good cured meet that we kept in the small room by the wood shed. One thing our house did have was LOVE. My Dad loved my Mom and there was great harmony in our house. In material things we had actually very little but we considered ourselves rich beyond counting to have our family. Sorry, I got off the radio story.


We gathered around the radio usually after supper. The beauty of a radio is that you have to use your mind. You make the pictures as you listen to the stories. Personally I think the following generations that had television missed out a lot on ''mental development'' because the TV provided the pictures as well as the sound.


We sat in front of the radio, beside the fireplace and roasted marsh mellows and made pop corn over the open fire. We felt the warmth of the fire and the warm love of our family. I remember very well that lots of times Uncle Harry would not be home or he was already in bed, Granny would sit and knit and listen and mom would corsage also. Dad would sometimes read the paper and smoke his Camel ciggie and listen at the same time. Sometimes we would sit up till ten o'clock and listen to the ''Creaking Door '' with Boreas Karlough and I would be scared to go to bed in the dark room. Dad would come in and assure me that all the ''haunts and boogers'' were scared out of the room and it was safe for me to go to bed......


The old radio served us well for many years until dad finally bought us a 17 inch Motorola Television for $475.oo which was about a months wages back then. He and mom saved up the money and bought it at Rose Radio and TV store.


The days of watching the radio are gone now. Never again will we hear the programs that inspired our minds to ''start working''.... The programs that inspired our imagination and made us develop ''muscles in our minds'' so that we could make our generation the smartest, most developed, chance takers the world has ever seen.


Enough for now from a old man remembering when he was a boy of about seven years sitting around watching a radio with his family....