With two working adult children living at home, Dad and Mom had more financial security than they had enjoyed in many years. Those two working adult children, my brother, Ron, and my sister, Diane, were happy to lavish the family with luxuries it would never have enjoyed otherwise. One of those luxuries was a radio. To a generation raised on television, computers, and DVDs, a radio may not sound like much of a gift. But in 1946, a radio was the entertainment gift.

This radio was a Stromberg-Carlson that Ron and Diane presented to the family. It was large, as were most radios in the 40's. Its wooden surfaces were deeply stained and varnished in light and dark shades of brown. Its large window displayed two bands of radio - standard AM and short wave. FM was not yet popular. Four dark brown knobs lined up single-file under the window, controlling ON/OFF, SW/BC (short wave and broadcast) and STATION. The other knob, the second one from the left, was my favorite because it controlled a feature that gave me endless hours of pleasure as a child. It was labeled R/PH. "R" stood for "radio." "PH" stood for phonograph. Lifting the top of the radio cabinet revealed a 78 RPM turntable and tone arm.
It was not very long before we built up a collection of 78 RPM recordings. These records were ten inches in diameter, and very brittle. They broke quite easily. They contained one song per side, and the sound they produced was tinny and definitely not high-fidelity by the standards that would be in place even as early as the middle 1950's. But we all loved to play the records.

When we were not listening to records, we listened to the music selected by the real-life disc jockeys of WJR or WWJ in Detroit, or CKLW in Windsor. We listened to several programs as regularly as people today watch their favorite television programs. One favorite at our house was Arthur Godfrey Time, which aired each weekday morning. In the afternoon we listened to Kate Smith singing about the moon coming over the mountain, and in the evening we heard Fibber McGee opening his famous closet. The comedians of the day were popular at our house. I remember lying in bed at night when Mom thought I was asleep, but I was listening to Jack Benny or Bob Hope on the radio in the living room next to my bedroom. We could hear the sounds of the world through that radio. Our imaginations provided the pictures to accompany the sounds.

"It's twelve noon in New York," one program which aired on Saturday began, "eleven o'clock in Chicago, ten o'clock in Denver, and nine o'clock in Los Angeles." I didn't think I would ever see any of those cities in my whole life. They were so far away. They were even in different time zones!

We also listened to the news each day on "The Great Voice of The Great Lakes." That was the motto of WJR in Detroit. We listened to "Your Good Neighbor Station," which was CKLW in Windsor. This station played music much of the time, with news and weather reports at frequent intervals. And sometimes we listened to WWJ or WXYZ or WJBK. I learned early that the stations whose call letters began with a "W" were in Detroit, and the ones that began with a "C" were in Windsor.

Ron and Diane's gift to the family in 1946 no longer plays the sounds of the world. It was made for a type of electrical circuit that no longer is used either in Canada or the United States. The 78 RPM's now rest in a cabinet; they can no longer be played. Some of them are damaged, chipped, or cracked. Their sounds are forever locked in the grooves that technology long ago left behind. But their sounds are still fresh in my mind, just the way I heard them fifty years ago.

Condensed from "Windsor's Child"

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