100 Years of Radio: Part 1

This episode begins shortly after 9 am on the Saturday I turned 6…for reasons that will forever remain mysterious, the present from my grandmother was a Lloyds portable transistor radio…model tr-62…made in Taiwan…built with 6 transistors… This thing revealed a wider world to me…I grew up in a small town with three tv stations (one of which was in French) and the only radio I heard was what mom and dad listened in the kitchen or in the car… But now that I had my own radio, I discovered that there were many, many, many other stations out there…and in the wintertime, when the atmosphere turned into a giant reflector for distant am signals, I started to listen to stations from Minneapolis, Denver, Chicago, Louisville, and many others… At some point, I decided that I wanted to be part of this world of news and information and entertainment and music…and to make a long story short, here I am…. ‘course, you may be listening to this as an internet stream or a podcast…but the original construction of the program was for traditional, terrestrial over-the-air FM radio… Radio is everywhere:  the clock radio, the kitchen, the stereo in the living room, the car, the office, the gym, the store…in fact, there are so many radios that they outnumber people in North America…there are thousands of FM stations and thousands of am stations…. But because radio is so ubiquitous, most people don’t give it much thought…it’s always been there, and it’s always been free and it’s so easy to use…radio has become so tightly integrated in our lives that we don’t notice it perhaps as much as we should… And then there are those who maintain that radio is dead and that no one listens anymore…that’s rubbish, of course…I could cite you all kinds of all kinds of statistics to prove that radio is still very popular, powerful, and profitable—like almost 90% of the population listens to radio over the course of a week—but just take my word for it… But radio is in a period of transition as new technologies come into play…however, the radio industry is very aware of what’s going on… These are all reasons why I want to talk about radio….plus this will give me an excuse to play some great songs about the medium… Oh—did I mention that radio has now officially been around for 100 years?....yes…yes, it has—and here’s its story…