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Here’s a small joke I often repeat around the house (so slight it has never once been rewarded with a mere chuckle.) “Maybe I should get a hobby?” As it happens, I have them by the dozen. Most get revisited only on occasion: The Life magazines in the attic? I may pull a couple out per year. Rebuild a fountain pen, or service an old alarm clock, maybe tune-up a color television from 1957? On short notice I can pivot and go to work. Most recently it’s been one of my vintage cars that has kept me busy.
It seems the radiator needed some work; research pointed me towards Chesapeake Cooling Solutions in Hillsboro. An unsolicited testimonial: they did an outstanding job, were professional, and prompt. The only bad thing I can say about them is that I couldn’t find an ad for them in the Review! Maybe this month? Anyway, I needed to run over there and pick it up; best, I decided to do this before work. Make no mistake, I’ve never been a morning person. I do like lemonade, though. How could I turn a pre-dawn drive into something special? Why, turn to one of my oldest hobbies: turn on the radio.
From the time my fingers could work the thumb-wheel knob on that little General Electric transistor, I found myself hooked. The receivers improved a bit over time, and as a teen in the eighties I was quite enthralled. There is a term for what I enjoyed doing, dating back to the earliest days of the medium: DX’ing. Wikipedia simplifies. “...the hobby of receiving and identifying distant radio or television signals…” One of the best times to search the dial is when night and day co-mingle. Perfect for my journey!
Some believe AM to be dead; perhaps you, yourself, had forgotten about it. I’m pleased to say, not quite yet! Certainly, it has its struggles. To broadcast any distance requires electricity, and real estate, and at least some manpower. None comes cheap these days, as we all know. Were it easy I’d quit my job and open a station myself. (And wouldn’t that be something!) But radio, just like this magazine, needs advertisers to keep afloat. There are fewer willing to write the checks these days.
In many ways the hobby has become easier. In those pre-internet days one could spend an hour listening to some garbled station trying to determine just what it was. At one point I purchased a copy of White’s Radio Log (still in my library, held together with masking tape.) I could look up call letters and frequencies, trying to put together the puzzle. Some nights the station would eventually fade away, a complete mystery never to be solved. Other times? I’d finally hear the call letters only to find out it was not farther away than Southern Maryland! Today, of course, all you need to know is a web search away. “Who’s playing gospel music on 1250?” Bam! “Where is WPGP?” Easy. One can even click on the station’s website and listen live, as confirmation. Yes, it does take some of the challenge out of the way.
That morning excursion led me to tune in a few more times in recent weeks. I spent an hour or two cozied-up to one of my favorite vintage sets, a pre-war Stromberg-Carlson. With some tweaks of its many dials, I can find something to hear on nearly every frequency of the AM band. I picked a spot, and slowly crawled along: WBBR, Bloomberg News out of NYC on 1130. 1140 was WRVA Richmond; on 1150, was that WNLR Churchville, VA? Google says they’re off the air; might be WCUE, Cuyahoga Falls, OH, which would be a great catch! There’s reliable WWVA Wheeling on 1170, and at 1190 those fun call letters WOWO, Ft. Wayne, Indiana. WTLA Syracuse on 1200 was a rare one for me; 1210 WPHT from Philly, not so much. I called it a night after Cleveland’s WHKW, 1220.
Do I really think I’ve intrigued you enough to try it yourself? Well, my breath, it is not being held! But the next time YOU get stuck in the car with not enough to do, avoid the “same-old new technology.” Flip over to AM. It just might surprise you.
