No More AM Radio in CArs

One thing that I always remember about listening to Red Sox games as a kid in the 80s - the AM signal picking up thunderstorms. Cable hadn't come to our area yet and we couldn't pick up WSBK from our rooftop antenna, so I would listen to WILI in Willimantic, or WTIC in Hartford. You could tell both how large and how far away the lightning was based on the crackle.

Although the FM station out of Rhode Island sounds crystal clear for games today, if there is a thunderstorm in my vicinity, sometimes I'll tune in to WTIC just to experience that crackle again - AM warts and all.

I have some old baseball games in my collection on radio, and one in particular is a 1957 game with the Yankees and White Sox at Comiskey Park. In the early goings, you can tell that a thunderstorm was near because you'd hear that crackle pick up in intensity and Red Barber noting that the rain is starting to fall.

 

AM radio at night was a little bit of a window into different cities back when the stations themselves weren’t homogenized. Now if you even come across a local host, often as not they’re still raging at the same national politics as the syndicated guys. And the ads seem to be all the same scammy bullshit nationwide ads that rely on bargain basement rates to yield enough suckers to cover their nut.

 

I'm probably the oldest 46-year-old you'll meet so I have fond memories of AM. One of the Pittsburgh Pirates promotional giveaway games that I lobbied hard for when I was a kid was "Radio Day," which went with me to the local pool so I could try and tune in a baseball game (No. No girls were interested in 12-year-old BYM at this point. Thanks for asking though. And, when I did reach dating and driving age in high school, the minute I dropped the girl off and drove home, it was with some talk show on AM).

I always had a hard time falling asleep as a kid and turned to talk shows to have some sort of noise as a distraction. It's always been my first love and would have pursued a career in it but was talked out of it by multiple people in the industry, including one of the local hosts: Doug Heorth, who I had discovered listening one night trying to fall asleep. It's where I also discovered Larry King, pre-political extremist Jim Bohannon and Costas Coast to Coast on Sunday nights. Outside of Pittsburgh, I listened to Herb Score and the Indians followed by Geoff Sindelar postgame out of Cleveland, Tigers games on WJR, the original Charlotte Hornets games with Steve Martin and Gil McGregor and the occasional Cleveland Cavaliers game with Joe Tait. Joe Venigno on WFAN late nights, Sports Byline USA with Ron Barr, Tony Bruno on ESPN radio when it started as a weekend feature. I could go on forever on this.

I've said on here before, in a lot of ways, AM was the internet before the internet.

 

He was great.

 

I've shared this story before.
An AM blaster in Boise (KKOO 1260) had the same frequency as a smaller station in the San Fernando Valley (KGIL 1260). The Boise station bled into the Valley station at night. Boise broadcast Boise State basketball, the Valley station broadcast Pepperdine basketball. One night, they were playing each other. You could hear announcers from both teams calling the same game at the same time on the same frequency.

 

Trucker Radio was a blast.

 

Used to be you could spin the dial at night after midnight and get not much more than Bruce Williams and Art Bell. Bruce Williams just abruptly disappeared and Art Bell retired twice (and has since passed), but not much else has replaced them. The old trucker show is now just another right-wing screech fest (they still play the Howe's Lubricator ads tho).

 

Bruce Williams retired the first time in 2010, the second time in 2013, and died in 2019.

 

My parents thought Bruce Williams was a rock star, even though they didn’t have two nickels to rub together. There’s no way his show would succeed today.

 

Spent many a late night in the office working on this or that with my soundtrack set to the wackiness that was Art Bell. He's dead now, but his shows live on. All I do is say "Alexa, play Ultimate Art Bell on Tune-In" (or Dreamland Radio on Tune-In). After a couple of ads up front, it's then gloriously ad-free for as long as you care to listen. Some of the doomsday warnings and future predictions from 25 years ago are hilarious.

 

Wasn’t Alex Jones an Art Bell understudy?

 

TIL it isn’t Hal’s Lubricator.