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skerbango-blog · 6 years

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Making My Playlist: Don’t Touch That Dial

By Scripty.

The stalwart was the size of a kid’s shoebox. Roughly seven inches high, four inches deep and eight inches across. The left half of it comprised the speaker, while the right side housed the on/off switch, volume & tone dials, a tuning dial and station maps. The radio sat on the right of two twin shelves off the cabinetry above our kitchen sink. The left shelf had a Mother Mary statue and whatever small plant my mother was over-watering at the time. There may have been an ashtray or small Tupperware cup holding loose coins holding court with the doomed plant.

The radio was in our kitchen from at least the time I was born. Recently, my dad claims he bought it at a Radio Shack in 1972. For all my sisters and I know, it came from ether and just emerged on that shelf when the house was built by my grandfather and great-uncle. I don’t even remember where it was plugged in. When my folks moved in 1994, I presume the warhorse was left behind, becoming ubiquitous to the house like the coved ceilings or shaded porch. The radio never teetered on that small shelf, or gave any sense of imbalance. It was safe, reliable and absolutely unremarkable.

Looking back, it was in fact an amazingly boring radio. Boxy and uncool as a household electronic could be, its origin was probably like most of my parent’s belongings. This normally meant it was either a garage sale find, or something given quite un-imaginatively but lovingly as a gift.

My best guess is this was a 1969 Realistic MTA-Model 11 AM/FM Radio. I would not be surprised if somewhere, this very radio still worked, regardless of usage levels. This device existed to do two things well. The first was to work, day after day, year after year, decade after decade.

The second was to work best in my mother’s ideal kitchen environment. The radio was to play at a modest level. Not too loud - heavens no. In fact it was never to play loud. But yet not too soft, as there were three children wearing out the yellow-orange tile linoleum kitchen pathway through the kitchen, between our backdoor and living room. Not medium either – it was to be played a smidge below medium. That was the volume and the volume was that. My mother didn’t ask for much, but us not touching that radio was one of those items.

This acute volume was necessary to my mother’s routine. Daily she would be the first one to wake, then she’d get a teakettle of hot water boiling. Two slices of toast would be topped, usually with butter but occasionally with some Smuckers jelly. Coffee meant Maxwell House instant grounds, a modest teaspoon of sugar and enough milk to bring the drink a half-centimeter below the rim of her coffee cup.

My father was a fireman, so his mornings were either spent rushing to the firestation, preparing to leave the firestation waiting for his replacement, or sleeping in from his constant workload. So my mother and her routine set forth our mornings.

Every morning she would read the vast sum of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, poring over the front section, the metro section – especially the obituaries, the sports and comics. The order she read them varied, usually whatever looked bleakest captured her attention. That might be a murder, the recent Cleveland sports atrocity or bad news for Judge Parker. Then she was off to make some lunches, race through getting herself ready and us kids prepped for school. Sometimes there was a third slice of toast, or perhaps letting our dog out the backdoor.

This routine took time. Normally, she started around 5:45am - but often earlier. Given these early hours and the house being a classic postwar bungalow – her discretion led to the radio’s volume being this modest level. She’d hear the top news and light rock, finding zen her before the day took shape.

My two older sisters shared the upstairs, while I was assigned the cozy bedroom between the main floor’s kitchen and bathroom. Not only did this room sit as a breezeless hotbox in the warm months, it bracketed the two noisiest rooms of the house. The smacking of the screen door (as my mom let our mutt Daisy out) was yet another noise that I remember serving as an unofficial alarm clock. What I mean is that there were many, many mornings that my mom and I shared a very early breakfast: her and I, two meager breakfasts, the morning paper and that radio. Sometimes I’d share in the white toast but normally it was cereal and 2% for me.

That radio station would change every so often, if by often - we meant every other Olympics. These channels would be of the Casey Kasem Top 40 variety, some soft light rock with some pop sensibility. I was too young to know the world of more definitive rock was out there, but I wasn’t being denied content either. As I knew it, the radio existed to play the likes of Billy Joel, Rod Stewart, Elton John, America, Fleetwood Mac, Eagles, along with the Bee Gees or even some Jim Croce or Dan Fogleberg.

I was born right at our nation’s bicentennial, so these morning encounters became frequent in the early 1980s and continued for the next decade. Some mornings few words would be exchanged, but it was not due to lack of love or warmth. I respected her routine, and I was more than happy to scour the daily box scores of the sports page (Indians CF Brett Butler is among the AL’s top five in triples, and Harold Baines leads the majors in GWRBI!) or attempt to discern the JUMBLE answers before everyone else. The sports page could disappear when my father’s Metamucil-fueled decampment necessitated, although he did settle for the crossword on many occasions. As I said, I was the youngest so it was best for me to embrace that morning détente before my junior rank was called front and center.

There were other radios and sound systems in the house. The living room had a console stereo system. This stereo cabinet had a turntable that would pick up an album and turn it over. Then the turntable would move the LP and play an LP below it. But I recall it working less and less over the years, its top soon shuttered and then it served as a catch-all for our family’s clutter. Sometime after I started elementary school it disappeared.

Via my sisters, I inherited a smaller phonograph. The photograph was in something akin to a typewriter case, a orange-red box about 16 inches square. This had one speaker and played an assortment of 45’s my sisters gave me. St. Elmo’s Fire, Tainted Love, Hey Mickey, and such were part of a 20-30 disc collection they gave me. But the youngster in me had no idea the record needles were that fragile and after breaking a number of them, my mother had enough and away that went.

Our basement had a rec room, with slate tiles and a very cold and sometimes wet floor. If we didn’t empty the dehumidifier bucket, the basement and furniture down there developed a peculiar funk but my mother trained us well to empty that with regularity. We sometimes had some soccer or battleball-type games down there, along with a Big Top Pinball machine that my Dad got in 1980. At some point a modest 8-track player was down there but I only recall there being a few tapes for it that we ever played. I know there were some with movie music, as some Star Wars shootout music and another with the Rocky theme, along with your Captain & Tennille yacht-rockish fare.

The garage had a General Electric transistor, that was perched on a thin shelf in a odd manner designed to bring in the right AM stations so my dad could hear the Indians or whatever he wanted. Although he was constantly working on our fleet of jalopies, he rarely used the radio while working on them. The radio came on mainly at the end of a work session, where we might be fixing a new outlet on an extension cord, or stripping the copper or brass of something before we sent it to the garbage. Cleaning up the garage floor was a constant affair, as sawdust was sprinkled on the oil drippings to keep us from stepping in the slicks.

But the kitchen radio was the main cog of our AM/FM needs. It was also played after family dinners, when my siblings and I were on kitchen detail. We had no dishwasher appliance, so it was standard operating procedure for my sisters and I to do the dishes and clean the table afterwards.

Deana, my oldest sister, would start with a few pots and pans while my other sister Marcy and I cleaned off the table and managed the leftovers. Then a formula of the oldest washing, the middle child rinsing and yours truly drying. All dishes were to be dried and returned to the cabinets. Once all the dishes were washed and rinsed, the drying and putting away became communal. I was the youngest and worst at the dishes, so I was assigned the plates, salad bowls and drinking glasses. These I could do without leaving some water on them.

My parents would disappear after dinner, re-runs of M*A*S*H or The Rockford Files awaited them. But we were permitted to turn the radio on for the dishes. Eventually we tired of the soft rock mainstays, as child cannot live on Bread and Herb Alpert alone. We weren’t supposed to touch the dial or volume, as the decades of use had tempered the dials to love their home settings. Other stations and volumes could work, but not necessarily with ease. But my sisters were daring and would change the dial, usually to the nearest alternative. These were fun nights but sooner or later they’d forget to change the dial back and mother would set things straight when her morning routine was greeted with an unfamiliar disk jockey.

And so that radio stayed, and played, for years and years. My father told me bought that from a Radio Shack in 1972. Mom said they sold it at a garage sale when they left the house in 1994.

There are many more formative music experiences for me, but I think it started with that radio. Unobtrusive playlists and mild volume made it the background music for my first years. My parents moved to their current residence in the fall of 1994, and the new house had a radio set in the kitchen wall. My mom has it set to her station, and she still reads the paper every morning. She’s retired so the routine starts later in the morning, but those songs remain the same.

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