When I was a little boy in the 50’s, the world was simpler. My parents were proud owners of a robust RCA Victor “tube” radio housed in a splendid mahogany cabinet. I would read Dell Comics for hours on the floor in front of its ornate facade while the world poured its potent vintage into my young mind. Radio was an intoxicating medium. The singers, funny guys and radio dramas were thrilling, and I accepted them uncritically like best friends. Mixed in that golden decade too were some scary things like polio, the Cold War, Nikita Khrushchev and atomic blast warning drills. To my boyish imagination, radio’s potent intimacy was like wind currents to a hawk soaring high in wide-open West Texas skies. Radio had the power to convince a little boy in a dusty oil town that he was pretty sharp and maybe even Captain of the World. What it could not transmit to him, of course, was savvy and experience. These would have to be acquired out there, in the world, the hard way and across a lifetime. Did I intuit any of this during my childish radio reveries? One dreamy hot day while listening to the Andrews Sisters’ “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy”, I realized with a shock that all three sisters were singing that song. Patty was not singing her own part while at the same time ventriloquizing Maxine and LaVerne’s. My whole radio world of ventriloquists disappeared that afternoon. I was seven years old. Father Barker. +++
When I was a little boy in the 50’s, the world was simpler. My parents were proud owners of a robust RCA Victor “tube” radio housed in a splendid mahogany cabinet. I would read Dell Comics for hours on the floor in front of its ornate facade while the world poured its potent vintage into my young mind. Radio was an intoxicating medium. The singers, funny guys and radio dramas were thrilling, and I accepted them uncritically like best friends. Mixed in that golden decade too were some scary things like polio, the Cold War, Nikita Khrushchev and atomic blast warning drills.