Reminiscence: Listening to Radio as a Child

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Although my radio listening today is limited to classical music, NPR, baseball games, and an occasional old radio show online or on MP3 CD, it is still probably true to say I have listened to radio just about my whole life, now almost 70 years long.

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From the time I was a toddler in central Texas and during summers even after I had started school, I spent mornings with my mother and our maid Clorey as they did the routine housework. The radio seemed to be always on, starting with Arthur Godfrey Time every morning (often after Don McNeil and The Breakfast Club). I also remember Mother working around the house while listening to favorite soap operas, many of which ran for 15 minutes daily, such as Our Gal Sunday, Just Plain Bill, Ma Perkins, and in the afternoon, Young Widder Brown and Pepper Young’s Family. As Mother got supper ready each evening, in my memory One Man’s Family was always playing on the ivory-colored, bakelite Philco radio on the kitchen shelf.

Our family sometimes listened to early evening shows like Truth or Consequences, Life with Luigi, Twenty Questions, or Lum and Abner (I could never figure out why that was Mother’s favorite). I remember sitting at my grandparents’ house about 200 miles north of our home beneath a tall old radio console with a small lighted-up orange dial, listening to Pappy Lee O’Daniel: “Pass the Biscuits, Pappy!  [” This must have been after 1948, when he finished his term in the U S Senate.]

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At some time during grammar-school, I got my own radio. The first was perhaps a crystal receiver which did not require electricity; I remember fooling around with the ear phone and this small green plastic torpedo-shaped toy that was tuned by pulling out or pushing in a little copper-colored shaft which when fully extended was about four inches long. I listened to snippets of whatever I could tune in, I suppose.

Soon I had my own, real radio in my bedroom. On many a long summer afternoon, I could be found there working a jigsaw puzzle, or drawing and coloring a picture, while listening to The Game of the Day, with play-by-play announcers like Buddy Blatner, Lindsay Nelson, Al Helfer, the old Scotsman Gordon McLendon, and Dizzy Dean – each on a different day, of course. The Yankees were the dominant team in baseball, and they seemed to be on more often than anyone else with Rizzuto, Jerry Coleman, Berra, Gil McDougal, Mantle, Gene Woodling, Bauer, Ford, Lopat, Alllie Reynolds (“The Chief”), and all the others.

But National League games were carried too, so I could hear about Musial, Banks, Kiner, the great Dodgers, and all the rest. I don’t know why, but Eddie Stanky was one of my favorites back then. (Later, I switched to Rizzuto because his name was on my glove… It was black!) And what about Feller, and Rosen, and Nellie Fox?

A distant but powerful big-city station would sometimes come in pretty well, for some reason carrying every Chicago White Sox game; maybe their local minor league team was in the Sox’s farm system. The nearest minor league team, the Pioneers, was not affiliated with any major league club, but they played teams in the Big State League who were. Their games were on almost every night, and there was a year or two when I listened often, noticing how the crowd background noise always seemed the same and how the announcer would sometimes fall silent. There was sometimes a clicking noise in the background. (Much later I learned that the announcers did not travel with the team and gave the play-by-play from a teletype machine, while speaking over recorded ballpark sounds.)

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By the time I was in high school, my radio listening habits had changed. On weekends I eagerly plugged into western dramas and cops-and-robbers shows, often on a little portable I took with me as I did my required yardwork. Favorites included Have Gun/Will Travel with John Dehner and Gunsmoke with William Conrad and Harley Bair, The Green Hornet, Mike Hammer, Suspense and Inner Sanctum… And of course there were the comedy shows: Amos and Andy, The Jack Benny Program, Ozzie and Harriet, Phil Harris, Martin and Lewis…

I was no longer waiting all week for Saturday morning to get underway with Sparky’s high-pitched voice calling out, “No school today!” or for Let’s Pretend (but I probably would sneak in a listen now and then.)

The little tabletop radio belonging to someone else in the family somehow had its case broken, and I adopted it. I set it up on the bedside table right next to my pillow. Eventually it had no case at all, so at night when the lights were off I could see the warm glow of the vacuum tubes in the dark.

By this time, I had discovered that radio musical accompaniment helped me to focus on “boring” homework assignments. Now that I come to think of it, I wonder if back then in the late 1950s evening network programming wasn’t becoming limited to Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights – and in about 1955, when I was about 12 or 13, the Pioneers ceased to exist! – so that on the radio, music was about my only alternative.

Although my tastes at this time were not absolutely catholic, they were at least “episcopalian,” as I enjoyed listening to pop, country and western, and – it seemed unusual in my crowd – rhythm and blues. Where I lived in Texas, the strongest stations were the Austin ones: KTBC, KVET, and KNOW … plus one other that I will describe in a minute.

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I can’t remember what I tuned in shortly after supper (surely, gasp, I didn’t endure just… silence!), but I believe it was eight o’clock on week nights when a program of country and western music came on called “Western Cavalcade.” They advertised a popular night spot just north of Austin called the Dessau Dance Hall where in fact many of the stars of the day performed, whose latest hits were played each evening on the air, people like Ernest Tubb, Webb Pierce, Ferlin Husky, Rex Allen, Slim Whitman, Lefty Frizzell, Hank Snow, and others of course.

Women’s names don’t flood back in my memory, but there must have been songs by women on “Western Calvacade,” at least Patsy Cline. Jim Reeves and George Hamilton IV were favorites, I seem to recall, as well as a new recording of “The Streets of Laredo” whose young artist – with a big, deep voice (no, not Marty Robbins) – I can no longer remember.

And I have been saving the best till last.

Every week night, at nine which was my usual bedtime, I could hear from Austin a local D J who called himself “Dr. Hepcat.” As I lay there with the case-less radio murmuring next to my ear, this older African-American gentleman would say, with “Sweet Georgia Brown” playing behind him: “Hello, chappy. Hello, chick. This is your old friend Dr. Hepcat…” (I eventually came to discover that the good doctor’s real name was Lavada Durst.)

So almost every night - as I remember it - I would drift slowly off to sleep listening to Dr. Hepcat’s current favorite singles by the likes of Al Hibbler, Fats Domino, Ben E King, the newcomer Sam Cooke, Jackie Butler (“The Ice Man”), The Clovers, Etta James, Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, maybe eventually The Platters, and Chuck Berry. As I remember it, Dr. Hepcat played the better known, more mainstream R and B performers…

But that was not so much true of the D J who, on Austin’s KTXN on Saturday mornings, played Little Willie John, Big Joe Turner (“Boss Man of the Blues”), The Robins, The Charms, Ruth Brown, Big Mama Thornton (“Hound Dog” makes a lot more sense coming from a woman), The Midnighters and The Cadillacs, Little Walter, Bull Moose Jackson, Lavern Baker, Ella Mae Morse, the young Ray Charles, Little Richard, The Gladiolas, Roy Hamilton, Ivory Joe Hunter, and so many others.

KTXN was a little, mostly Spanish-language station that was on the air only during the daylight hours. I understood it was located on Austin’s east side (where Mexican- and African-Americans lived). Jockey Jones’s show was - I believe - the only KTXN program that was not in Spanish, and even some of Jockey Jones' commercials were en espagnol. His principal sponsor was a market called Guajardo’s, whose special seemed always to be H and H Coffee.


How I wish I could tune in again this morning to Jockey Jones and to the Mutual Game of the Day this afternoon, with Dr. Hepcat to look forward to tonight. What a treat that would be!

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