The Radio

I  was nearly eleven years old when we got our first radio and I’m quite sure you could not buy one like it today.  It was to say the least, quite a contraption and needed a battery since we had no electricity. The battery itself must have weighed more then ten pounds and was made up of two sections lettered A and B. Plugs from the radio would be connected to both but on top of all this you needed two wires outside, one was a ground wire and the other had to be about twenty feet in the air. All of this was necessary to pick up the signal from the radio stations in St. John’s. We had not heard of TV at the time and radio was all the craze.  Some people had no idea how such things worked and one woman was known to have turned off the radio when a news bulletin came on thinking that she could save it for when her husband came home!   There was also what we called serials, stories that continued  each day, but unlike today’s TV soaps, would eventually end. I remember rushing home from school to listen to Pepper Young’s Family or Ma Perkins.  A must  for the six weeks before Christmas was Jonathan Thomas and his “Christmas on the Moon”.  I listened to NHL hockey on radio on Saturday nights with Foster Hewitt doing the  play by play, but my favourite nights were when I would listen to boxing from Madison Square Garden in the heart of New York City.  At night we could pick up stations from other parts of Canada, and even the US. I was hooked for life when I listened to my first fight on Sept.27,1950, It was the night that Ezzard Charles defeated Joe Louis to become heavyweight boxing champion  of the world! Picture this if you will, I was the skinniest kid you ever saw, probably weighed about  fifty pounds when wearing twenty pounds of clothes, yet  my ambition was to be a boxer, and not any old boxer but a heavyweight! I ate everything in sight but it made no difference – it’s rather ironic that  now that I’m heavy enough, it’s about fifty years too late! One of me favourite boxers at the time was Jersey Joe Walcott,  and I remember the excitement I felt the night he became the heavyweight boxing champion of the world. I should have been at the party, I couldn’t sleep anyway!  Radio was different from TV, you had to use your imagination. I sometimes wonder now how I pictured these boxers and hockey players or even the characters  in the stories, of course, with the actors I did have the voice to go by. A few years later when I saw some of them on TV, there were a lot of surprises. I often wish since that I’d kept that radio and even if the man inside didn’t talk anymore, it would certainly make a great conversation piece.