I like to listen to the radio, particularly late at night. When I was a kid growing up in northern Michigan I used to see how far away I could pick up a signal. I could get WLW in Cincinnati and WBBM easily in Chicago, and on Sunday nights I could pick up a NY station that would broadcast the NY Philharmonic...seems so strange to think of radio as a travel machine, a virtual map on electrons. Now I just dial it up on the ole PC but it looses the magic of fade and untuned signals.
I lived in Tulsa for a while and a fellow who retired from WFMT in Chicago, that huge midnight special arts station started up this little bity thing called KCMA. John Majors was his name and he sold after a while. It cost nothing much to operate the station and most of us did it for free but the big deal of compiling a program that worked out to the second and then being a classical DJ on weekends was, well, a treat.
The broadcast facilities were north of Tulsa in the middle of what could charmingly be called cow-shittin' country as that is all there was as far as the eye could see...cows and cow...well dung or chips. The reach of the station was unbelieveable...all the way to Joplin and the other way to Oklahoma City...250 miles in a circle....all that power...beaming Mozart to the horizons of the earth.
I'm on eastern long island now and have a SW so I can listen to Europe or I can just crank up my PC and do it that way...with a cable modum my little outfit is hot potatos but I think I'll stick with the fuzzy stuff and think back to signing off at 359am and signing on at 4am, wind blowing, smell of a fresh cut field and of course the occasional cow.