I want to talk about my experience with radio when I was very young.
Radio? Rather than television?
There wasn’t any TV when I was real young. I’ll get to that subject at another of our talks.
Okay.
I was probably only a few years old when I first became aware of radio. After supper my parents would go in the living room, and I would join them. Then I noticed that Dad would go to a piece of furniture and turn something on it. And voices would come out of it And music.
.
Mom would start knitting.
And Dad would read the paper.
They’d do that while listening to a voice talking about what was going on around the world.
Then later different voices would come on along with some music and I would hear the voices say things about someone called Charlie McCarthy or Henry Aldrich.
What did you do then?
Me? I had a so-called magic slate — the kind where I would draw on it with a stick and then lift the film to erase whatever I drew.
And I would draw pictures that I thought matched what the voices on this piece of furniture were saying. Later I learned the word “radio” when my parents referred to that thing that had the voices. And obviously, I thought, the voices had to be coming to the radio through that cord that was stuck in the wall.
In another year or two I came to realize what radio was all about. And my dad bought me a really neat gadget.called an Ultra-Mike. I could tune the radio to a frequency where there was no station, turn on the Ultra-Mike, and tune it to the same frequency and hear my own voice coming out from the radio. How cool was that!
Dad also explained how a crystal set could pick up radio stations without plugging it into the wall. So we ran an antenna wire from my bedroom out to the garage, and I could pick up stations on a headset by fiddling with a wire on a piece of crystal. That was pretty neat too.
As my interest in radio grew, so did my appreciation of the sound effects that helped create the images in my mind. I learned that there were people at the radio studio whose job it was to make the slamming doors and other sounds.
And, to my surprise one Christmas morning, there was a present for me called a Sound Effects Studio. It was a desk-like console that supported various means for making sounds. The console was of heavy cardboard that my parents had assembled after I had gone to bed.
I know how that goes.
On the console were, as well as I recall, a door that opened and closed, a hand-cranked sandpaper drum for making wind noises, a balloon with pellets inside for making thunder, a rubber ball cut in half for footsteps or hoof beats, and cellophane for fire or frying sounds. And a mallet with three metal bars for making the NBC chines. The notes were G-E-C, I think.
My interest in radio grew from there.