Old-Time Radio, Part 1

I remember Old-Time Radio in a personal way. I can yet see images in the room cast in silvery silhouettes at evening twilight. Don, my older brother, and I were usually lying on the floor, sometimes on our backs looking up at a distant ceiling. Or we would be lying flat on our bellies with chins resting in cupped hands - looking at images that were not there.

We had hardwood flooring. Maybe we laid on those bare floors, maybe on throw rugs; I no longer remember. Mom and Dad laid transverse across the bed with their heads propped up on folded pillows. Sometimes Don or I might be up there next to them. That is the way I remember listening to radio in the 1940’s. In Mom and Dad’s bedroom, in the dark, on the floor.

We had several radios in the house. It was not because we were rich. Dad knew a lot about them. He picked up broken ones, pirated parts off others, and resurrected them. There was a big floor console in the living room. It had a phonograph player under the radio dials. You got to it by sliding flexible double doors, one on each side, back into the console.

The basement, a radio graveyard, was stoked with tubes and empty chassis. This was before transistors came into common use. Radios were, by necessity, big and heavy. The chassis that radio tubes were plugged into were made of steel, and radio tubes were large, ran hot, and sucked up electricity. You could quickly run a car battery down by turning the radio on while the engine was off. Don and I did just that when Dad went in a store one time and left us sitting in our 1947 Pontiac.

There were only a few books in the house. Paperbacks would not become ubiquitous for a couple of decades, and kid’s books were rarely found in most homes. Mom read The Bears of Blue River, a book about early settlement in Indiana, to us a couple times, and there were selections from Hurlbut’s Bible Stories. There was a stereoscope that we looked at once in a while. It had ten or twelve heavy cardboard photos, each a bit larger than a postcard. There were two images on each card. The images looked identical, but had been taken a few feet apart. You slipped the card into a metal frame of the stereoscope, and slid it back and forth on an arm to focus - presto, a 3-D image appeared. I don’t remember what the photos were about - maybe WWI scenes. Don and I looked at them a few times, but it was mostly for idle curiosity. We had a phonograph player and a few records. I don’t recall any music for sure. There was one by Elmo Tanner, a whistling song called Heartaches. I remember hearing it a lot, but maybe it was just on the radio. Radio was the major source of news and entertainment in those days. President Roosevelt comforted America with his "FireSide Chats" during the Depression and the War, and we gathered around it at night - the focus of our entertainment.

GO TO: Part 2