Digressions: My Life in 500 Words or Less
Remnants of my childhood brood in huge plastic containers in my home office. These are items retrieved from my family home over the past few years as my siblings and I prepared the house for sale. These items hold special memories, and sometimes they pout for me to relive them.
Such is the case of my transistor radio. More accurately, my red transistor radio. My red AM transistor radio. My red Admiral AM transistor radio. My red Admiral combination flashlight and AM transistor radio. My red Admiral combination flashlight and AM transistor radio with keychain strap.
Yeah. It was all those things. And back in the ‘70s, when I was a teen, that radio provided me endless hours of entertainment.
More than anything, that radio was a connection to other worlds.
I listened to crackling broadcasts from local and distant radio stations. I sang along to music blasting out of that radio during solitary moments throughout the day or allowed songs to drift out of that radio on my pillow near my ear to lull me to sleep at night. I entered contests on local stations and counted down the American Top 40 with Casey Kasem.
By far, the most vivid and happy memory involving my red Admiral combination flashlight and AM transistor radio with keychain strap revolved around listening to Radio Mystery Theater. (For those who aren’t familiar with it, Radio Mystery Theater was a broadcast of radio plays focused on horror, suspense and the macabre.) Such a format was perfect for me. Radio theater relies on the listener to use imagination to fill in the blanks, escalating the premise that what you don’t see is more terrifying than what you do. As a writer, I cultivated imagination on a regular basis.
Radio Mystery Theater came on at night. If I remember correctly, it came in from a radio station in Chicago. Usually, to enhance the spooky atmosphere, I would crawl under the blankets to listen to the broadcast in complete darkness.
Memories of specific episodes of the program are next to non-existent. What I do remember was how much I enjoyed the experience of allowing myself to be drawn into a theater in my mind. Radio Mystery Theater and that transistor radio became forever linked.
When I retrieved the radio from the family home, I had felt a pang of nostalgia, and that feeling resurfaced when I recently saw the item again. Like a program broadcast on a faraway station coming over that radio, memories crackle seemingly out of nowhere, not always clear but invariably received.
