My relationship with radio is almost as old as I am. From the radios of my early childhood until the tiny match-book sized player I often use today, the radios of my life are indelibly stamped on my senses. Yes, I can hear them but I can also still see them and feel them in my fingertips.
The first radio I remember sat on our kitchen counter, near my mother's chair. She was the ruler of the radio. That radio was just before the time when everything was made of plastic; I think of it as white-painted metal, small with ridgey plastic knobs that I can still feel between my thumb and forefinger, and a little window that glowed as the tubes inside warmed up.
The next radio was also white and this one was plastic with a large tuning knob and the on/off/volume knob just under it. Our kitchen table was against the wall and the little radio, next to a small lamp, was on the wall-side of the table. It looked a little like this:
The radio was always tuned to CKMR which was a small radio station in Newcastle, five miles up the Miramichi River from our town of Chatham.
The local content was most valued by its listeners but CKMR was also a CBC affiliate so there was some diversity in the programming.
One of my earliest radio memories was The Fisherman's Broadcast (still on the air and known now as The Fisheries Broadcast) which came on every day at 5:00 p.m. The little radio on the table kept us company as we ate supper and I can hear the theme music in my head to this day. It was where I learned of the places called Conquerall Bank and Petit de Grat. It was on The Fisherman's Broadcast where I first heard of cod scrod and its daily price in Boston — and the daily price of all the other fish in Boston. I didn't see the word scrod again until a trip to Boston many years later when I saw it on a menu.
Our lunchtime programs — when we went to the White School, we came home every day for lunch — were, I discovered much later, classic soap operas, in the original sense, sponsored by soap: Ma Perkins, Pepper Young's Family and Laura Limited. I don't really remember the story-lines but I remember being politely shushed when every day's cliff-hanger ending was playing out.
One of the morning programs I remember was called the Maritime School Broadcast. I must have heard it only if I were home sick because I'm pretty sure we didn't have snow days then. (The main thing I remember about big storms is that I was allowed to stay at school for lunch.) I also remember hearing the School Broadcast on rare occasions at school. In retrospect, I think it's possible that the teachers might have brought in their own radios and provided themselves with a bit of a break without feeling guilty.
Another morning program was called Good Morning Mrs. Housewife. It was what you'd expect — tips for housewives about how to host a smart canasta party, how to get tea stains out of your best linen, how to make sure the gravy was served with no lumps. For at least part of its run, it was hosted by Eileen Sproul, a good friend of my mother's. They were fellow choir members at St. Andrew's United Church where Eileen was an acclaimed soprano soloist.
It's always been of interest to me that, even though Eileen's was the only female voice I ever heard on the radio, when I graduated from high school, the little blurb beside my photo said, "Her ambition is to be a radio announcer." I did grow up to work in radio as part of my career in journalism. I didn't do Good Morning Mrs. Housewife but I definitely did women's issues. Oh yes, I did. And that's a whole other story.
On Sunday afternoons we would, without fail, see our father become a classic Philistine. Dr. Louise Manny, a distinguished local historian and folklorist, had been commissioned by Lord Beaverbrook to collect and record the old Miramichi folksongs. She had done so and at 3:00 p.m. every Sunday, she shared her recordings on her radio show. The minute it came on, Dad would stomp and mutter and grumble, "Turn that @#$%^&* blankety-blank racket off!" Mum objected to his fake swearing but she didn't care for the program either so 3:00 p.m. Sunday was always radio-free at our house.
I didn't appreciate Dr. Manny's work until much later and although it was never my favourite genre, I still keep the vinyl record of Dr. Manny's collection:
Both Mum and Dad definitely preferred the beautiful duets of Gerald (Jerry) Fitzpatrick and his daughter Donna (McLean) on their program called Songs to Remember. And of course, they happily listened to the immortal Bing Crosby whose theme song was Where the blue of the night meets the gold of the day. (It turns out that Bing, after some scepticism and controversy about the various sources, did indeed have a Miramichi connection so perhaps we could consider him local content also.)
For my sister and me — especially when she was a young-to-mid teen and I was what they now call a "tween" — the highlight of the week was the Top 10 Hit Parade. It came on at 12:15 p.m. Sunday, just after church got out, and it was much to our chagrin if the minister preached too long or if either of our parents tarried on the church steps, having a nice Sunday chat with friends and neighbours.
This was before the days of Top-40 radio and CKMR played mostly country music on its DJ-style programming (Hayshaker's Hoedown, anyone?) so the Hit Parade was of great importance to us and the only way we had of keeping up with popular music. We were not yet buying records. I remember the first records I bought were 78s of un-named singers covering the popular numbers of the day. Kind of no-name records. I bought them at a funny little counter in the back corner of Lounsbury's Furniture Store. I played them but I was always uncomfortably aware that these weren't the real artists although they tried hard to sound like them.
Popular music went through some major changes in the mid-1950s, generally believed to have started with Bill Haley's Rock Around the Clock. Here are some medleys of the songs we were listening to at 12:15 p.m. every Sunday — just a smidgen of each song but it's fun. Here's 1955, 1956 and 1957.
By Sunday evening, homework done, bookbags packed, blouses ironed for Monday morning, we gathered in the living room to end the week with a good laugh. The radio we listened to looked a lot like this one:
I can't tell you what order they were in. In fact, I'm not even positive they were all on Sunday evening. In no particular order then, we listened to Our Miss Brooks, My Little Margie, Amos and Andy, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet and, last but never least, the great Jack Benny.
There were others. I know that many of my contemporaries listened to westerns, mysteries, science fiction: Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Batman, Sam Spade, The Shadow. Believe it or not, if you click on these links, you can listen to them too. (I feel a little retrospective guilt over Amos and Andy which probably included every Black stereotype that anyone could think of and, as I've since discovered, had an all-white cast playing the all-Black characters. This changed — duh — when the show moved to television.)
When I was in my mid-teens, my parents gave me a gift of my first portable transistor radio. It changed my life. I loved it so much. Very different from the compact little pocket radios that came later, it was a little bigger than a box of chocolates and came in a leather case with a handle. It looked a little — not exactly, but a little — like this:
I took my radio everywhere I could -- to the beach, sitting in the backyard, across the field where I used to sit near an old abandoned railway to read. My radio was such nice company. And at night, I would take it to bed, pull the blankets over my head and listen to WKBW from Buffalo — "50,000 watts of Rock 'n' Roll." It was a whole new life experience for me and I felt worldly and sophisticated.
That other radio in my life at the same time was the hi-fi. It resided in the living room and because television had already made its appearance, it never did get the attention that the other floor model radio had in an earlier time. For me, the hi-fi was for playing records — mostly musicals, which I loved then and still do — although it was also nice for playing romantic music when I was keeping company with a young man in the living room. This photo of a hi-fi is very close to what ours looked like and, interestingly, years later, I also owned this album:
The last radio that I took such a personal interest in — and that brought me still new radio experiences — was the table-model Grundig that my sister gave to me when I was a senior student, still in residence, at the Montreal General Hospital School of Nursing. It was my first radio with the FM-band and I couldn't believe the wonderful luxury of non-stop music — on lots of stations — with no commercials. I had only minor experience with classical music so this was the first time I was able to listen and hear distinguished (sometimes pompous) voices teaching me as the music carried me away. I loved my radio:
A long time after, I left the radio with a family friend who was going to fix some little problem I was having with it. I went back to pick it up but he had taken it apart and hadn't quite got around to putting it back together. About a year later, I tried again but by then, he didn't really know what had become of it.
There have been other radios in my life since then but none of them have captured my heart the way my earlier radios did.
Until quite recently, there were radios playing all over my house. Moving from room to room was never a problem; you weren't going to miss anything.
But one day, I turned all the radios off. I don't miss them. We live on a busy street and, with windows open, I enjoy hearing conversations of people passing on the sidewalks. I can hear the birds and I can hear the pouring rain. I've heard it all before — and I guess you could say the same thing about what's on the radio. The difference is, the sounds of outdoors soothe me and we can't get enough of that, can we?
Further interest: for those who remember the legendary CKMR announcer, Art Matchett, this is an interesting look at him.
And Byron Christopher is a journalist who worked at CKMR in the '60s. This is his story.
