Becoming Interested in the Radio

Jamie Music History #12

The first time I remember being interested in which hit was the biggest one was when Glen Campbell’s Rhinestone Cowboy was being played a lot. I was with Stephen and Dave one evening in their room, listening to a radio station that was taking requests; people would call in the song they wanted to hear. We listened to Rhinestone Cowboy four times in a row at one point, and probably eight or nine times over the couple hours we listened. It was pretty popular!

AM/FM radios were easy to come by in those days. They could be found built into your alarm clock, which was the kind I had. I could search up and down the dial, and zero in on a station to see what was playing on there. There was almost never anything on the FM side of the dial where we lived, up north of Moberly Lake, so I was tuned to the AM dial all the time.

On clear winter evenings I could find and identify a lot of radio stations. There was one station I could pick up that came from Edmonton, and they were the broadcasters for Edmonton Oilers hockey games. I tuned in to a lot of Oilers games in the winter of 1979-80, their first year in the NHL, and became an Oiler fan.

One cold evening in 1981, with time to spend, I started at 8 pm on the far left of the dial. I turned until I got a station, then listened to that station long enough for it to identify itself by its call letters, wrote it down, and kept turning. I finished at about midnight, about the time a good many of those stations went off the air. I had identified forty stations that night. That is a pretty good variety, considering that I lived on the back side of nowhere. The farthest stations I could pick up were in Salt Lake City, UT and Portland, OR.

My dad had an old Short-Wave radio in the living room. It did not get used much. But we did flip its dials around every once in a while. That radio could pick up broadcasts from Quito, Ecuador, from the Mediterranean, and from the Far East. The gospel of Christ was preached behind the walls of the Soviet Union via short-wave radio. The broadcasters in Ecuador did gospel messages in a bunch of different languages, and sent them abroad. If you could set up a short wave radio in Vladivostok, you could hear in Russian about what God had done for you in Jesus Christ.