Learning – Mostly From Memory

Radio Kid

I’m not out to defend parents who allow the iPad or the Television to “babysit” their children. I’m here to talk to you about the radio.

You hear the term iPad kids these days. Or children who learned how to operate iPads before they learned to speak. Consequently, they develop an addiction to this device. It doesn’t seem to be a term of endearment, but rather a derogatory term. These iPad kids don’t have a clue about how the real word is. I remember hearing the same kind of language when I was a kid but attached to Television. All these kids know how to do is watch TV. When I was a kid we were out riding bikes and throwing rocks at trains. I suppose every generation in many ways thinks that the following generation doesn’t have sense enough to “pour pee out of a boot” as my Dad used to say. And out of convenience perhaps we humans site the most recently adopted technology as the cause for a child’s …well a child’s natural childish behavior. I’m not out to defend parents who allow the iPad or the Television to “babysit” their children. I’m here to talk to you about the radio.

I was a radio kid amongst a bunch of television kids. We didn’t have a TV in our home. In the 90s this was unique. I’m not even sure if TV is still a relevant medium for entertainment, so it may no longer be strange to not have a TV today. But we did have a radio, and I liked to listen to it.

The AM/FM receiver, turn-table, and tape deck were all one and the same for me. The noise came out of the same source: The Radio.

Records

I think my earliest memory of recorded music was from the record player. We had a record of The Drifters singing Charlie Brown. I remember listening to that a lot. And dancing in the living room. We also had a Justin Wilson record I guarantee. Gram had a lot more records than we did. My favorite was the Disney Robin Hood record. It skipped on Friar Tuck saying No, but there’s somebody who will be very disappointed if you don’t come, don’t come, don’t come, don’t come… Gram would have to come and fix the needle so we could get on with the story.

I don’t remember many more records in particular that I had such a strong attachment to-excepting that there was a lot of country music. The old stuff like Hank Williams and Jim Reeves. I remember the audible artifacts of that old vinyl. The pleasant white noise and the occasional crackle and pop of the needle bouncing over debris. It is still a pleasant noise to me.

Tapes

Someone always had to load a record for me, but I was able to figure out the tape deck by myself. I listened to a lot of preaching tapes on the radio. One of my favorites was a Bro. Mahuron preaching at Alabama Camp Meeting. I kind of feel like that lightning bug that got caught in the ceiling fan. I am delighted to be here. He also told a story about playing baseball with Fred Blosser. He was a big ole boy, he had to hit a home run to get a base hit. I would request this preaching tape-especially on car rides-not for the theological substance of the sermon, but for these humorous preliminary remarks and sermon illustrations. Then I would settle in for a pleasant nap.

I got a Johnny Horton tape for Christmas when I was about seven years old. They probably bought it just for The Battle of New Orleans, but I ended up liking Whispering Pines, Comanche, and Sink The Bismarck just as much. It really took me a long time to realize that there were other genres of music besides country. I am slowly coming to terms with how much of my musical foundation is this early post-war country music. I still appreciate the storytelling aspect of real country music. And maybe that is why the guitar has always had a stronger pull on me than the piano.

Mom bought me a Merle Haggard tape at Food World one time. This is what I hear when someone plays a Telecaster. This was electric country. With electric bass that faked an airplane on Fighting Side of Me. Hearing these musicians create sound effects with their instruments made a lasting impression on me and shaped the way I interpret music.

AM Radio

Dad listened to a lot of AM radio in the truck. Mainly Sports Radio 690 WJOX-Birmingham! Skip Carey would call the Braves broadcast on this channel. It’s a high pop-fly foul into the stands, and a fan from Del Rio, Texas makes the catch! We’d listen to those games while we were in the hayfield with the truck windows down and the radio up. That’s when The Braves were going to the World Series in the 90s. There was also a radio show with two former basketball coaches-one from Auburn, one from Alabama-called Sonny and Wimp. Wimp and Sonny, one thinks he’s smart, one thinks he’s funny, They used to be coaches they used to have clout, do they really know what they’re talking about? And another show with a man named Herb Winches that Dad listened to pretty regular. It was all sports so I really wasn’t paying attention. I did get a kick out of the commercials though. The original Budweiser frogs and lizards were funny to me. The Real Men of Genius Bud Light commercials were also funny. It made alcohol seem like something you can laugh about. What a dangerous idea.

Dad used to say, “Boy you know that must have had some fun making this commercial!” One of his favorites was the Southern LINC cellular telephone commercials. Earl, a fictitious Southern LINC customer, told how Southern LINC had allowed him to expanded his business.

Thanks to you I’m branching out…Just the thought of it makes me shivery, Earl’s Septic Tank Repair, and Flower Delivery.

There was also a jewelry store somewhere in Birmingham that had a commercial where lovesick men would call in and ask for advice from a motherly character named Deadre. Talk to Deadre Darlin’. I still laugh about that. It was so funny that my cousin Kim named her dog Deadre. Gram run over that dog while backing out of the driveway. She heard it yell, then accidentally run over it again as she pulled back into the driveway. Poor Deadre.

Talk Radio was the forefather to PodCasts. The appeal of Talk Radio, at least for me, was that it was live. And they would take callers. Just ordinary people could call in and talk on the radio. This is the kind of entertainment that cannot be scripted. Even if you don’t like sports, you’d probably appreciate the drunk people who called in on the radio. Herb Winches took a drunk caller once who started out talking about some relevant sports topic and he got overwhelmed and just started saying You know, you good at what you do Herb. Dad laughed about this for months.

AM Radio had a distinct sound to me, and because of this I found it hard to listen to music on AM Radio. I now realize that there is less information coming through on AM than FM, so some frequencies are missing in the music. This is probably why audiophiles are willing to spend $50,000 on hi-fi stereo systems to listen to their record collections. So I never experimented much with AM Radio outside of listening to it with Dad.

FM Radio

I did experiment with FM Radio a lot. One of the first radio stations I remember hearing was Oldies 106.9. At that time they were playing everything from Elvis and Roy Orbison, to Motown and British Invasion. I remember hearing Love Me Do by The Beatles and being mesmerized by the harmonica sound. Dad told me the story of Delbert McClinton teaching John Lennon to play the harmonica. I didn’t realize that this was the music of rebellion in the 1960s. To me it was just like they were marketing it on the radio Feel Good Music.

We also listened to the Christian station out of Birmingham, 93.7 WDJC. Specifically The Dixie Gospel Caravan. Which was the evening Southern Gospel program. I used to love the song, I’ve Got a Feeling Everything’s Gonna Be Alright. This program was mainly Southern Gospel quartet music. And I imagined the bass singer as a face in the wall singing. That can’t be a real person. I also imagined the high tenor as tall and thin. I had a hard time telling the different quartet groups apart because the sound was so similar to me. And that is one of the reasons that I still don’t relish quartet music. Maybe I reached my quota of quartet music by the age of 9. Who knows?

I must confess, aside from The Dixie Gospel Caravan, I listened to the Oldies and Classic Country stations a lot more than I did the daytime contemporary offerings from WDJC. So there is a large gap in my Christian music canon. This is sometimes embarrassing to me when someone-usually a minister-wants me to remember-or even worse play-a Christian song from the 1980s which I have never heard. Or they ask me about a particular Southern Gospel Quartet. Did you used to listen to The Anointed Spoonbill Singers? No, Brother. I listened to The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Sam Cooke, and Marvin Gaye though. I ain’t saying it’s right, I’m just saying it’s the truth.

When I started learning guitar I would sit by the radio and try to play along with the Classic Rock station. For hours. The radio taught me how to play guitar. I still prefer to try to work out a song guitar in hand while I listen before I resort to the sheet music.

Public Radio

At some point during my teenage years I was introduced to Public Radio. It fueled my curiosity about classical music and introduced me to opera. For years I listened to NPR’s World of Opera while I was cutting the church grass every Saturday. Public radio also had some cool shows on Saturday’s too. Car Talk, What a classic show. I still shift my manual transmission truck into reverse when I park because of Car Talk. I also enjoyed A Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor. Which was a variety show sort in the style of Jack Benny or Phil Harris. Keillor’s show served up a healthy dose of Americana music. Which is to say a thick soup of gospel, bluegrass, country, blues, and swing. And it was live.

One of the strangest shows I remember was Hearts of Space, an electronic-new-age-ambient-music program. It featured artists like Klaus Schulze and focused heavily on synthesizers. My Mom didn’t like that show. Even though I didn’t fully understand it, I liked it. I didn’t know how those sounds were being created and I just accepted that it was with computers. I have learned a lot about synthesizers since first hearing Hearts of Space.

When I lived in Virginia I discovered The Big Broadcast with Ed Walker. This was my introduction to the golden age of radio shows from the 1930s-1950s. Ed was blind, and he made me wonder how much those old radio shows must have meant to someone who couldn’t see. I listened to that show until he died. I still listen to vintage radio shows on the Old Time Radio app with Wesley, but it isn’t the same without Ed introducing them.

Today

I suppose that you could find everything today on an iPad that I found on the radio, if you look in the right place. That’s just the thing though: the iPad is a very visual medium. While kids may still be listening, they are doing a lot of looking. And who can say what they are looking at? Radio and Television were pretty rigid in their programming. There was a time when you had to be good to be on the Radio. You may have just had to be good looking to be on Television. But now, anyone with a pulse can start a YouTube channel. And they don’t have to worry about getting dropped by a sponsor or advertisers because many people don’t make one red cent on YouTube but still churn out mindless videos of just about anything you can imagine. I think about this sort of thing when I see a child glued to an iPad. Time will tell how these children will turn out. I think they’ll be a lot like the Television kids. Which I don’t know if I have done a great job communicating with for most of my life.

I can’t remember the last time I turned on FM radio. I grew weary of the commercials long ago. And many of my favorite show hosts are now passed on. The Radio changed on me. But I still listen to something every day. In that sense I will always be a Radio Kid.

Spanish

In 2020 I listened to the audiobook version of Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes. I chose that book because it was included in my subscription to Audible and I didn’t have to use any of my precious credits. It turned out to be hilarious. I really appreciated how the 400 year old humor still made me laugh out loud today. It really made me think If the book was that funny in English, how funny was it in Spanish? It is because of this literary masterpiece and too many other books to name about the Spanish conquest of Mexico, pre-Columbian America, and Mesoamerican civilization that I decided to download the DuoLingo app and start learning Spanish. My Mom died that summer and I found studying Spanish a welcome distraction. And by Thanksgiving I became determined to make studying Spanish a part of my daily activity. That was over 1,000 days ago.

Some days I feel like I haven’t learned any Spanish at all. I am sure I would be further along if I was forced to speak in Spanish every day instead of doing the simple grammar exercises. I get the same feeling sometimes about guitar. To put things in perspective I flip the guitar over and try to play a few chords left handed and it makes me feel better about how far I have come. I have done this so much over the years that I am starting to get good playing left handed. With Spanish there are a couple of similar motivation reminders: I can understand spoken and written Spanish far better than I can speak it.

The other day I was at our church’s Fall Festival Fellowship standing around the grill with a bilingual brother and two Spanish speakers. We were eating grilled corn on the cob and they were jabbering away in Spanish. I wasn’t really paying attention to what they were saying until one of the Spanish speakers started talking about eating iguanas. It dawned on me that I was comprehending more or their Spanish conversation than I was not. “Iguana con leche de coco…es muy buena.”

La iguana es el pollo de los árboles

The most rewarding thing about learning Spanish has been being able to communicate with people who still only speak Spanish. Even though I still feel pretty vulnerable because I have to take my time forming my thoughts. There is something wonderfully exhilarating about communication.

Studying Spanish has also allowed me to see and hear English in a different perspective. Because of its silent letters, irregular verbs, and borrowed words from other languages, English is a difficult language to learn for a non-native speaker. You probably even know native speakers of English that still do not speak it well. Language, whether native or foreign, is a skill and must be honed. Studying Spanish has made me want to be a better English speaker.

A person’s vocabulary is a reflection of the books they have read.

There are some things in Spanish that just make sense. Like having punctuation at the beginning of a sentence, letters that only have one sound, accent marks that do not get ignored, and I almost hate to say it, adjectives after the noun instead of before.

I am a long way from writing in Spanish as well or as quickly as I can in English. But I still practice on my wife. When I think about writers like Joseph Conrad, who wrote in English, a language foreign to him, I am encouraged that some day I will be able to express myself in Spanish on such a level.

Bicycles

I will say that I do not recommend taking a bicycle on the railroad tracks.

You probably remember when you first learned to ride your bike. Maybe your Dad had been running behind you, holding on to the banana seat, and you looked back to see that he was standing twenty feet back with his hands on his hips grinning at you. You panic and then crash. This is repeated until you don’t crash, and that’s how a lot of people learn to ride their bike. Others never started out with training wheels, and were told to just go ride it. My Uncle Tony taught me to ride without training wheels at Gram’s house. It was a faded blue bike with gummy white rubber grips on the handle bars that left a tacky feeling on your hands. He was running behind me as I peddled, until he wasn’t, and I kept right on going. I’ve only met a couple adults who never learned to ride a bicycle. It’s difficult to imagine childhood without bicycles.

It seems like I wore out and outgrew bikes like I outgrew shoes. It probably didn’t help that we left our bikes laying in the yard to get rained on. My Dad would just shake his head when he saw this. When you got a brand new bicycle for Christmas it was easy to haul it up onto the porch and use the kickstand, but the new wore off pretty quickly after one good winter mud puddle. It never occurred to me to clean my bikes. The only maintenance I ever thought about was air in the tires and oil on the chain. Dad would catch the spent motor oil in an old kitchen pot with only one handle whenever we changed the oil in the family vehicles. After crawling out from underneath the truck or van, he would tell us to fetch our bikes. He flipped the bikes over and we would work the pedals as he poured the gritty black oil over the moving chain. You could feel the whole drive train working more smoothly as the lubrication was applied. This usually made a glorious oily mess as much of the oil splattered all over the rest of the bike. We didn’t mind though.

I had a bicycle with cement tires. It was already old when I got it as it refused to be worn out. Not many people I’ve talked to have heard of cement tires. There is a reason cement tires never caught on. Imagine riding on a pothole riddled road in a car without shocks at full speed. That almost gives you the same feeling as riding that bike.

Not content with standard issue, every boy in our neighborhood felt the need to modify his bicycle. The junkyard of worn out bikes at each house usually supplied us with adequate parts. Sometimes, probably most times, the modification did not make the bike any easier to ride or better. It was the feeling of seeing an idea come to life that gave us satisfaction. Adam Bryant put a go cart steering wheel on his BMX style bike. It was the hardest thing in the world to steer. Zach and I put bicycle tires on a scooter. It went a lot faster, but the bigger tires raised the platform to an uncomfortable height for anyone who actually wanted to reach down with a foot to scoot. Jared and Creed put roller blade wheels on a pair of two-by-four studs and pulled them behind their bikes. I’m not sure why, and when I talked to Creed the other day, he still wasn’t sure why. But they did it, and when they rolled up into our yard each with a makeshift trailer rattling behind them, their face shown with pride because of their ingenuity, and they wanted to share their success with us.

I will say that I do not recommend taking a bicycle on the railroad tracks.

We rode bikes everyday until one of us got a car, and our bikes sat out in the rain and rusted until one day a man that Dad knew came and picked them up for scrap metal. We didn’t realize it at the time but as I watched him drive away a chapter closed in my life.

To combat the sedentary nature of my desk job, I recently purchased a proper adult bicycle. I’ve ridden 225 miles since I started three months ago. The changing temperatures that you feel as you ride through the shade and the hollows of Alabama takes me back to being a child on a bicycle. Having a wreck on a bike as an adult however, is a completely different experience.

I’ve tried sporadically over the last year to teach Wesley how to ride his bicycle without training wheels. At times I’ve felt like a failure as a Dad because I haven’t had as much time as I’d like to devote to this task. Other times I felt like he almost had it, but he stopped short. A few days ago while I was at work, he got on his old smaller bike, and told his mom, “I’m going to practice riding my bike without training wheels.” Without any help on that particular day, he figured out how to ride his bicycle.

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