Chapter Twelve - The Radio

Chapter Twelve
The Radio


Bill Cosby in one of his comedy routines talks about their old floor model radio with 100 knobs most of which didn’t do anything. Ours didn’t have 100 knobs but it had a lot of knobs and looked similar to the one above. There was one knob to turn the radio off & on and I believe a separate knob for the volume. Then there was a larger knob like the white knob in the above picture with which you turned the radio dial above the white knob to tune to your station. You didn’t really use the rest of the knobs.

Remember there was a time when homes didn’t have TV sets. We would come home after school and sit on the floor next to the radio and listen to shows like “Jack Armstrong the All American Boy”, “Captain Midnight”, “Terry and the Pirates” and others. There were more family oriented radio shows too like “Fiber McGee and Molly”, “Red Skelton”, “Intersanctum”, “The Shadow” and one of my favorites “Jack Benny”. “Jack Benny” had a routine where he would go to the railroad station and you’d hear the track announcer say “train leaving on Track 5 for Anaheim, Azusa and Cucamonga”. It wasn’t until I moved to California that I realized that those were actual towns but that a railroad track would have to go all over the map to go through those towns.

Madison Avenue was selling to the kids back then too. The radio shows would make offers that you could send in say 50 cents and a cereal box top to get your own Atomic Decoder ring. I remember that the Lone Ranger show had an offer for building your own Western town. You’d get a paper map which you would put down and then put cardboard cut out building, which you assembled, on the map to build your town. They had different maps and buildings you could get of course by sending more money and box tops.

Some of the radio shows made the transition to TV such as “The Lone Ranger”, “Red Skelton”, “Jack Benny” and “Amos and Andy”. There were others too. One radio show that eventually made the transition to TV later when color TV came in was “The Green Hornet”.

While we’re on the subject of communications let’s take a moment to talk a little about Alexander Graham Bell’s invention the telephone. I seem to remember that at one time we had a “candlestick rotary” telephone like this:



I know that for several years we had a rotary dial phone like this:

The move from the old rotary dial phone to the push button phones was just the beginning of the communication technology revolution. When Ann & I went to the 1989 convention in Warsaw, Poland the in-flight movie both going and coming back was a Tom Seleck movie “My Alibi”. In it he had a mobile phone in his car which was built into a console between the front seats of the car. While in Poland one of our tour guides was very happy one day. We found out she had just got a telephone in her home which she had been waiting twelve years to get. Of course today everyone is walking around “wired” as they say. This high-tech communications has both a good and a bad side to it, I think.

Just a couple of more words about communications/entertainment. I remember when television came to Topeka. I was in Jr. High and one of my school mates was one of the first that I knew of whose family had a TV. Of course at first it was only in black & white and the screen was not large. TV programming would start about 7:00 AM and go off at midnight. They would always sign off playing the national anthem and showing a picture of the American flag. When the anthem was over they would show a test pattern for awhile that had a picture of an American Indian chief on it. Some of the shows that were popular in those days were: “Gunsmoke”, “Show of Shows” with Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca, “Truth or Consequences”, “The Fugitive” with David Jansen, “Wanted Dead or Alive” starring Steve McQueen and “Paladin” with Richard Boone. TV families included “Ozzie and Harriet”, “Father Knows Best”, “Leave It To Beaver” and who could forget “The Munsters” and “The Adams Family”. One of the first shows to go to color was “Bonanza” with the Cartwrights. With the advent of television came TV Trays and TV Diners both are still with us in some form or another. Both have probably been detrimental to the family evening meals together. Next time we’ll return to the school.