Radioland

If you've followed this blog at all, then you'll know that I am a lover and collector of old radios. How old? Anything with vacuum tubes in it. Anything made before - oh, say - 1965. Yup, I currently own 26 of them. Beauties they are too. Some I found in antique stores. A couple were gifts. Some I bought from The Radio Attic, an online old radio mall. Most of them I bought on e-bay. One - a 1960 Grundig Majestic console stereo - I found on Craig's list for $100, and drove to Cleveland, OH, to pick it up. It barely worked, but it was in great cosmetic shape. It sat around my living room for almost a year before I had the money to get it repaired. Now it's the centerpiece of our living room. We use it almost every day. It has an AM/FM/Short Wave radio, a working turntable, and a reel-to-reel tape deck. It's a thing of beauty, and the sound is unbelievable. And that's one of the biggest thing about these old tube radios - the sound. You've never heard radio, until you've heard it from one of these old tube sets. There is warmth, a resonance, a fullness to their sound quality that no digital, transistorized radio is capable of producing, try as they might. Nor do modern radios match the old

ones for style. Even the reproductions look just like what they are - reproductions. These old radios were crafted out of heavy, solid wood - oak and mahogany and teak - and thick Bakelite and opalescent catalin. They were heavy, substantial objects. Even the "portable" ones had mass and bulk. You wouldn't want to get clocked over the head with one of these bad boys. And they came is so many shapes and styles and colors that it boggles the mind. There were cathedrals and tombstones and consoles and chairsides and an infinite variety of table top models. And even portables that required a ton of batteries to keep them running for just a few hours. Then there were the dials. We're not talking about a couple of little digits glowing in a small window; although, the early radios had that. No, most of the radios I'm talking about had big, colorful dials lit from behind by incandescent bulbs that bathed the room in a soft warm glow. And the dials did more than tell you what station your on, like the digital ones do. They also told you at a glance what all of the possibilities were, cuz you could see all of the stations spread out before you, often labeled on the dial. And on the shortwave band, the foreign countries and cities would be listed across the dial - here's Argentina, and there's Paris, and Rome, and Tokyo's over there
- the whole world just waiting for you to tune it in and listen to it. And sometimes I do, late at night,

when all the house is asleep, I'll pad out to the living room, click on a radio, wait for the tubes to warm up, and then fiddle with the shortwave dial until I hear some voice in another language coming to me from the other side of the world. It's thrilling to me to think that I'm hearing someone in the southern hemisphere, or from Asia, broadcasting messages that are reaching me here in New England. And when I'm listening to one of my radios, I often think to myself that once someone else sat in front of this self-same radio and listened while Franklin Roosevelt declared war on Japan, listened to the strains of Tommy Dorsey or Glenn Miller or the Andrews Sisters, or the Dodgers winning the pennant, or the news that JFK had been assassinated. And when I think about that, I feel a little bit closer to those people, I wonder who they might have been, what they might have been worried about, what their hopes and dreams were. And then I think that they're all probably gone now, and I'm still here, and their radios are linking us to each other down through the decades. And I smile.