Radio’s Community

I am often asked what got me so interested in radio. Honestly, I really don’t know, but it’s been a longtime love. Whether it was trying to find KHJ (930 AM) on the Realtone transistor radio my Auntie Ina gave me when I was very young — instead finding KGBS (now KTNQ, 1020 AM) because I didn’t know any better, or playing with old tube radios that were given to me by friends and family, or even pulling the Citation III FM tuner out of storage to see if it would work with my brother’s guitar amplifier (it did), I’ve been hooked on radio almost my entire life.

I think much of the interest came from the relationship I had with the stations. Or perhaps the relationship they had with me. I was mesmerized by the personalities, the way they put on such amazing shows playing the songs I want to hear. Radio was my drug … listening to the radio made me feel good. Perhaps that is why to this day I have not done illicit drugs and why I get so much pleasure out of listening to good radio of today as well as in the past via air checks, or recordings of on-air programming such as found on realradio.com and airchexx.com, or even YouTube.

It’s also why I write this column – the amazing community that is radio. This community includes you, for you have to be a fan of radio to be reading this in the first place. Together, hopefully, we can encourage radio programmers and owners to keep radio relevant in our lives.

We are not alone. I have not seen Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” yet, but I will. Even my younger son commented how cool it was to hear air checks of KHJ as part of the time-period flavor of the movie … Tarantino included recordings of the station as background during many of the driving scenes. That a station that hasn’t existed in that form for decades is still relevant enough for a major movie production proves my point. 

Radio may be the most intimate entertainment medium ever invented, and is still so today, even if many stations forgot how to do it.

Help Line

Reader Teri Wilkinson wrote:

“I have been in contact with the Paley Center, The Smithsonian, the FCC, ABC and everyone else I could think of. Many contacts passed me on to someone else, I thanked them all for the info but apparently there is no archive of everything that is broadcast over the airwaves, at least not back in 1948.”

What she is looking for is a recording of a radio program from that year — May 21, 1948, to be exact — in which her parent-in-laws, Betty and Dan Wilkinson, were married. The show was called Bride and Groom.

“Apparently it was on the ABC radio network, and it was recorded at the Chapman Park Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, which has obviously been torn down. That is all the info I can find on the internet.

“I started out by contacting Jon at Old Time Radio; he has some recordings but only from 1947.”

Here is your assignment: do you or anyone you know have any information that can help Teri?

Fun with Woody

I was listing to the Woody Show on Alt 98.7 FM the other morning, amazed how they were able to broach a definitely R-rated topic without taking it past G status … all the while having what sounded like the time of their lives.

So I asked Menace, part of the morning team, if what we hear on the air is how it is in real life. “It pretty much is!” He responded. We are truly friends on and off the air.”

More of that wonderful community I keep talking about.

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