When I was on the radio . . . .

This post was inspired by a FB post that went like this: Child--Alexa, play Let It Go. Parent--When I was your age, I would call a radio station, wait on hold for 30 minutes till I got through, request a song then sit by my boombox for an hour with a blank cassette in it so I could record the song when it came on. Child--I don't know what that means.

I recorded myself on the radio once as a boy of about 11. It was on a general call-in talk show in New York City and I lay on my parents bed upstairs next to the radio tuned in to the station, dialed it up about 50 times on the rotary dial phone, which required seven twirls of the round number wheel for each call, always got a busy signal, had to hang up and repeat the process, but after an hour of constant dialing I got through to the station, waited 5 or 10 minutes more and got through to the radio host.

I talked for three or four minutes with the host about potholes in the roads which jarred my bike as I delivered the Herald Tribune each morning at 5 am and these vibrations sometimes caused the folded papers to fall out of the bike's basket. As soon as I got on I switched on my little reel to reel tape recorder and recorded the interview as it came out of the radio by my parents bed. 

The host explained that potholes were caused by the expanding property of water as it turns to ice after it gets into the crevices of roadway asphalt during cold weather. (I actually knew this but pretended that I didn't.) 

When I got off the host wondered to the audience why I was still up, it being about 9:30 pm by the time I got through to the station, and when I announced to my parents downstairs that I had just been on the radio, they merely said, "We wondered what all that dialing was for." 

So I check marked Being On The Radio on my life's list, but I doubt any kid today would have the patience, or the idiocy, to make a dialing motion 350 times, which also involved removing the finger each time so the wheel could slowly spin back. I also wonder if they would know what a cigar-box sized two-reel tape recorder was, or how to operate a rotary dial phone, or how to record a program by setting a running tape recorder next to a radio which was tuned in to a station. Memories of the early 60s.

Happy birthday, Mom! Vote tomorrow!