During the post-Thanksgiving weekend, I found time to turn on my paperback book-sized portable radio, plug in my earbuds and start turning the dial. Well, actually, I started pressing the buttons. As with many modern radios, this one has a digital readout rather than a dial.
But, in that act, I transported back 30 years. This explains why I find radio broadcast towers to be romantic, emotional symbols. Really, I do.
As a youngster in the suburbs of Los Angeles, I started listening to the radio when I was eight or nine. Somewhere, I have cassettes full of songs I taped off the radio in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I also made an aircraft band radio from a kit that I got as a gift one year, which allowed me to hear pilots interacting with air-traffic controllers as they headed into Los Angeles International Airport. In other words, I was a budding radio geek.
Then, somehow, I heard about shortwave radio when I was 12 or 13. I saved up for months to buy a Radio Shack multiband radio just before my 13th birthday (I think it was my 13th, though I can’t be sure without digging into some old notebooks). My dad kicked in the last few dollars. I bought it, rushed home, turn it on in the family room, and immediately heard an English-language station broadcasting from Ecuador. Ecuador! I was hooked.
I was more than hooked; I was obsessed. I wrote to shortwave stations around the globe and collected their specialized postcards and other memorabilia, including a large amount of propaganda-tinged items from East Germany’s Radio Berlin International. I listened to shortwave all the time, finding it to be a good alternative to doing my homework through my middle- and high-school years.
I also would spend long nights listening to AM stations from far away, when the ionosphere allows those radio waves to travel thousands of miles. That’s what I was doing on that post-Thanksgiving night a few weeks ago. Scanning the frequencies from my parents-in-law’s house on the Olympic Peninsula, I picked up stations from Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Wyoming and Southern California, as well as much closer places.
Hearing local news, high school basketball games or even music fading in from a few states away is like dropping into the conversation of someone you don’t know, if only for a moment or two. While I listen to podcasts from all over the world on my iPod in clear digital tones, that experience lacks the random surprise that trying to hear a station amid old-fashioned radio static.
My grown-up responsibilities like raising my children, never-finished housework, doing the bills, etc., keep me from obsessively listening, yet it still sparks my imagination when I have time to curl up with a radio.
Oh, I almost forgot about the radio towers. My fascination with them also goes way back, as I remember always being impressed whenever we drove past the huge KFI-AM broadcast tower in La Mirada, Calif.
Radio broadcast towers stand tall and silent, often with steadily blinking lights to warn aircraft. They look lonely and wistful somehow, even as they broadcast music or talk to countless people. They come in many shapes and sizes, sometimes atop tall hills or standing out from marshland. To me, they’re almost beautiful.
From where I live now, I can look to the southeast and see the red light of a small tower on a hill several miles away from us. It’s a mundane communication tower for the local public utility district, but I still like it.