Meador Manor

Turn your radio on and listen to the music in the air…is a gospel song written in 1938 by Albert Edward Brumley. Born in 1905 in Indian Territory, near what is now Spiro, Oklahoma, Brumley’s success with I’ll Fly Away in 1932 led him to try composing full time. He went on to live on the banks of Big Sugar Creek in Powell, Missouri, only four miles from what had been my great-great-grandfather’s farm before the Civil War and is now a restricted area of a state park.

Turn Your Radio On was first recorded by Lulu Belle & Scotty and Five String Banjo in early 1939, with later memorable covers by the likes of Ray Stevens and The Statler Brothers. When I was a kid visiting my spinster aunts in Bethany, I liked to play a 45 rpm single of the song by Skeeter Davis on their old stereo console.

My maternal grandmother was a devout holy roller who long refused to have a television in her home. When I spent a week with her one summer, I vividly recall how she would only allow the radio to be turned on for news broadcasts. She dared not listen to anything else, she said, for Ephesians 2:2 referred to Satan as “the prince of the power of the air”.

Her offspring did not hold to such restrictions, and my parents had a 1960s Zenith X375 clock radio in a nightstand beside their bed. It was AM/FM but had been built before transistors came along, so like our family’s old black-and-white televisions, it relied on vacuum tubes that had to warm up before it could play. Sometimes my parents allowed their only child to crawl into bed and sleep with them, and the click of its timer switching on the radio was enough to wake me. I remember waiting for the tubes to warm up enough to amplify the signal.

For my ninth birthday in 1975, my father gave me a radio of my own. At a garage sale he had purchased a RCA 55X AM table radio that dated back to 1941 or 1942. Its case was made out of thick solid wood and at 17 inches wide, 7.5 inches high, and 6.75 inches deep, it weighed 11.5 pounds.

It had five vacuum tubes and while the normal AM frequency range was 535 to 1605 kilohertz, it could reach up to 1705 kilohertz. Those higher frequencies had once been used for police radio. However, they had shifted to FM frequencies by the early 1960s, and to my disappointment I never picked up anything but static in the POLICE 170 range on the dial.

It struck me as uncanny to hear modern music coming from such an antiquated set. I promptly tuned in WKY 930, which had begun broadcasting from a garage in Oklahoma City in 1921 and was issued its call letters in March 1922. That makes it the oldest radio station in Oklahoma, so old that its three call letters starting with W sets it apart from the state’s many four-letter stations starting with K.

Anxious to hear a favorite song, I called the station on our landline rotary telephone, requesting that they play Wildfire by Michael Martin Murphey. I waited for over two hours through many other songs and various commercials. Deflated, I was ready to give up and turn off my new-to-me radio, figuring they had written me off as a dumb kid. Then the disc jockey came on after a commercial, saying he was going to play a tune “by special request” and made me feel special.

My father later bought me my first transistor radio, another garage sale find. It was a cheap Arrow 2601 AM unit that ran on a 9-volt battery. At 3 by 4.4 by 1.4 inches, it was over 23 times smaller than my table radio and weighed over 25 times less at under a half-pound with the battery in it.

My first AM/FM radio was a General Electric clock radio that would awaken me each morning with Easy Listening KKNG 92.5 instead of a buzzer. Times change, however, and I see that KKNG changed formats and frequencies multiple times since then.

I would go on to purchase an AM/FM radio and cassette player for my first car, a 1976 Toyota Corolla which I inherited from my holy roller grandmother. As I recall, it just had an AM radio, or, knowing her, maybe it was missing entirely and just had a blank filler plate in the dashboard.

I replaced my portable radio with a Walkman cassette player that included an AM/FM radio, and when I moved into my first apartment I replaced the dated woodgrain GE clock radio with its red LED display with a small cube-shaped Sony Dream Machine ICF-C10W with blue LEDs. I used that thing for decades.

I also had radios in my Soundesign 6827 combination stereo and the later Technics SA-150, Panasonic SAHE100S, and Sony STR-DN1080 receivers. There were also radios in my Sony CFS-1000 and Philips Sound Machine boomboxes. However, I almost never used the radios in any of those systems.

Old habits die hard, and sometime while using iPods between 2004 and 2007, before my first iPhone, I bought an FM tuner dongle. I was startled by how tiny it was, not being much wider than its 30-pin connector to my iPod Nano. However, I also never made use of it.

Instead, I mostly listen to radio broadcasts when in my car. In addition to news during my commutes, I once enjoyed National Public Radio’s Car Talk, This American Life, and Prairie Home Companion along with Wisconsin Public Radio’s To the Best of Our Knowledge. However, only one of those programs is still produced. I also still enjoy catching snippets of Fresh Air interviews, but Terry Gross has been doing that for 50 years, and I don’t know if that show will continue once she is gone.

In a few months I will lack a work commute, which could reduce my engagement with NPR news, although I do listen to its hourly newscast as part of my bedtime ritual. I still plan to support my local NPR station for now, especially given the Republicans’ termination of 50 years of direct federal support.

Radio itself certainly isn’t dead, still commanding about 1/3 of overall time spent listening to audio in the USA. I find it fascinating that only 1/20 of folks’ audio time is now spent listening to owned music while 1/4 of audio time is spent streaming music. I have almost 18,000 songs in my iTunes music library, and I paid for most of those before streaming became a thing, so I’m probably way above average in the time I spend playing owned music.

28% of Americans’ audio time is spent listening to radio over-the-air broadcasts and 4% with radio streaming. Having streaming available is increasingly important as household radio ownership has declined significantly over the past 15 years.

Back in 2003 I invested in an 11-pound Cambridge Soundworks 730 clock radio, similar in size and weight to my 1940s RCA tube radio from my childhood. The new radio was AM/FM and had superb sound quality. I bought it for my office in the newly constructed science wing at Bartlesville High, thinking I might want to listen to the radio or plug in my iPod for rich sound without earbuds while I was grading. I even wired it up to what was then an analog cable connection for the school, as that used to carry both FM radio as well as TV analog signals.

However, I wound up neglecting the big radio. Eventually I just played music on my iPhone’s built-in speaker while grading papers. When I moved to the district’s central office in 2017, rather than bring along the table radio, I shoved it up on a high shelf in the garage at home.

My approaching retirement motivated me to invest in restoring broadcast television to Meador Manor, so I decided to explore bringing back broadcast radio as well. Until Wendy also retires, I’ll have plenty of time alone at home when I might tune in a station.

We do have a portable battery/wind-up radio in our interior closet for use during tornado warnings, but I wanted to see if my 23-year-old table radio would still work. I cleaned it up and plugged it in. I was surprised to see that it still remembered my station presets…the 9-volt battery in it was over a decade old but still worked, and even the time was only off by maybe 15 minutes after nine years of storage.

The radio could pick up KWGS 89.5 and KYFM 100.1, but I didn’t bother trying AM because the original AM loop antenna’s plastic decayed long ago. Unfortunately, the volume knob didn’t work consistently, no doubt due to a dirty contact on the rheostat. I put a lithium coin cell into the credit-card sized remote control, and that worked fine.

There was too much hiss and crackle on 89.5, so I stretched out the power cord and checked that the radio was switched to use that for FM reception. That helped, but it still wasn’t good enough. So I ordered a 75 ohm telescoping antenna with an F connector. When it came in, I attached it, but the connector in the radio, which had once been attached to the old analog cable at the high school, was far too loose. I unscrewed the bottom of the radio and found the internal connector was broken. Some soldering might have fixed it, but I decided to give up on the old radio, knowing I had a superior modern option at hand…or should I say at mouth?

We have Google Smart Home Displays in our bedrooms and kitchen, and a Google Home Mini in the living room, and they can stream radio stations. Theoretically, I could listen to our local NPR station by just saying to any of them, “Hey Google, play KWGS.”

However, I found that the voice recognition system, which usually works okay, struggled with “KWGS”. It kept trying to play the artist KWG on YouTube Music. I tried various changes in phrasing and specificity, but Google’s voice assistant was just too stupid to figure it out.

So I opened up the Google Home app on my iPad and manually programmed two additional Automations. Now the devices will stream KWGS if I say, “Hey Google, play public radio” while they will stream KWON if I say, “Hey Google, play Bartlesville radio”.

That latter Automation did have a side effect. If I tell our Google Home devices, “Hey Google, play Turn Your Radio On“, they stream KWON. Sorry, Mr. Brumley.