For the first decade of my life, even as I explored every corner of my parents’ small apartment in the Bronx, I paid no attention to the dark wood cabinet with double doors that remained forbidden closed in one corner of the living room.
Instead, the center of attention in the room was the television in the opposite corner. It was a General Electric model, perhaps with a 12-inch screen. My brother and I watched our Saturday morning cartoons from the floor in front of him, while our mother periodically warned us to stay away from the screen so as not to hurt our eyes. (For the record, I’ve never heard of an actual case of visual damage resulting from too close a view of Alvin and the Chipmunks.) After he finished his dinner, he commanded the couch, the television, and the rest of the living room.
One day in the late 1960s, when I was around 10 years old, I finally opened those mysterious double doors and discovered a set of knobs and dials. It was a radio, a Philco “highboy” from the 1940s, as they used to call those cabinet-mounted receivers that stood on four thin legs. Of course I had to turn the knobs. At first nothing happened except a slight hum. Then the vacuum tubes were heated, as were those on our television, and soon the room was filled with the familiar voices and music of New York City AM radio stations, but with richer sound from what he was used to hearing. Even a child could tell the difference.
I never saw my parents use the radio in the living room. My mother preferred a simpler transistor model that she kept in the kitchen. The large closet arrived at their home shortly after their wedding in 1946. They had it in their first apartment in a building without an elevator in the South Bronx. He traveled with them to Washington Heights in upper Manhattan, where I was born, and returned to the Bronx with us in 1960.
I had a kind but not close relationship with that radio for a couple of years. Some afternoons he would listen to the Yankees when he came home from school. In those days, many weekday baseball games were played in daylight, which rarely happens now. But when we moved across the Bronx to a new apartment in 1969, my parents gave the Philco to another family in our old building. It would have been expensive to take it with us, and as far as they were concerned, it made no sense.
This development did not disturb me, because I had my own radio. Two, actually. One was a little eight transistor drum job, the kind every schoolboy in the 1960s had. My childhood version of streaming music was turning on that radio and waiting for a station to play the Beatles.
But my most prized possession was a GE tabletop radio with two speakers that my parents bought me in 1968 as a reward for an unusually good report card. That little radio, with its tubeless design (“solid state,” as marketers said) and faux wood plastic casing, was the closest I got to having a stereo until I bought one after college. . He walked me to our Catskills bungalow in the summer. At night he listened to the Yankees when they played and the distant Baltimore Orioles when they weren’t. Unbeknownst to me, while I was playing during the day, my mother used my radio to get the recommended daily allowance from Tom Jones and Engelbert Humperdinck.
Once puberty hit I became a nocturnal creature, as many teenagers do. School seemed like a good place to catch up on sleep. At night I would get out of bed in the wee hours of the morning, turn on the radio and listen to news, sports and the weather from the farthest places I could get to. The clear channel stations came from cities like Toronto and Minneapolis, and from unlikely corners like Louisville, Ky. And Fort Wayne, Indiana. He could get French stations from Quebec and New Brunswick, and Spanish stations that might have been from the Caribbean but were probably in Mexico, where illegal high-power broadcasting was all the rage in the early 1970s. I can’t say for sure as I didn’t understand French or Spanish. That’s what happens when you sleep during high school language classes.
The tabletop radio disappeared while I was in college. A relative needed one and my mother, thinking that I no longer had any use for my GE, gave it to him. I don’t think I made much of a fuss about it, but I suspect my parents felt bad. Shortly after graduation, I was presented with a huge black portable Panasonic that had AM, FM, and five shortwave bands. A few years later, I heard reassuring reports from Radio Moscow about a serious but well-controlled nuclear accident in a place called Chernobyl. I still use that radio sometimes to listen to a baseball game over dinner.
But I don’t use shortwave anymore, and I don’t have to wait for the channel signals to be clear late at night if I want to tune in to a distant station. I can get almost any remote broadcast just by going to the internet. Even KIYU, operated by Big River Public Broadcasting Corp. in Galena, Alaska, is within range of my iPhone, my iPad, and my computer. These devices have become today’s supercharged radios.
Of course, those beautiful vintage sets are treasured by collectors who appreciate the history, engineering, and in some cases the design and craftsmanship that went into them. Any good New England antique market has a collection of vintage electronics, some in good shape and some showing their decades old.
I tracked down a brother from my old GE tabletop radio when I sat down to write this article. I showed the photo to my wife and told her the story of my fifth grade award. For around $ 15, you could have it again. She asked if he wanted it.
I felt torn. “I don’t know,” I said, “but I think I will be able to decide after writing this article.”
And so I have. I’m not buying that tabletop radio. I don’t want to give my mother a reason to feel bad about giving mine away. But more than that, I just don’t feel the need to relive my past. Those old radios are part of a distant world that I grew up in. They are not part of the world I live in today. I can appreciate what I was given as a child, even if I now listen to distant radio stations on the latest smartphone.