One of the earlier favorite memories I had as a kid was the radio. I enjoyed listening to the radio. But I had no control over the stations when I was real young. The radio in the barn was on KDHL. Polka music, weather and farm market reports was all it played. There was a radio in the milking barn and one in the hog barn. My dad said it calmed the livestock to hear music all day. It sure helped beat the monotony when I was cleaning and feeding the animals.
In the car it wasn’t much different. My dad controlled the dial and it was usually WCCO and the Minnesota Twins with Herb Carneal and Halsey Hall. About the only music they played was the Hamm’s beer commercial. All we knew existed back then was AM (amplitude modulation) and I had no idea what that meant. Just that it got fuzzy when it stormed and clicked in time to the electric fence around the farm.
My dad had an old red transistor radio that operated off D cell batteries. I would take it out with me when I did farm work like cleaning calf pens and listen to KYMN in Northfield. Its range was quite limited and that was all I could find in my musical tastes.
Somewhere around 1971 I purchased my own transistor AM radio. I believe I bought it at the Gambles Hardware store. It was a futuristic style in the form of a round yellow globe with a silver chain and ring attached to it. It was a Panasonic Panapet designed to commemorate the World Expo in Osaka, Japan. It had two chrome dials for volume and tuning and the AM display inset on the surface of the ball.
This was great, now I could listen to my favorite radio station, 1270 KWEB Rochester. I kept in in the headboard of my bed and listened to it before I went to sleep and the first thing when I woke up. C.J Stevens was one of the deejays at KWEB and I remember he was killed in a tractor rollover accident on his dad’s farm in the early 1970’s. This radio used the small 9-volt batteries which lasted much longer than the big old D cells.
Our tractors didn’t have radios. They didn’t even have cabs. I bought a fender radio at Farm and Home and put on the John Deere . 4020. It was only an AM radio but it kept me from falling asleep in the field.
The radio is a great marker of time for me. Often when I hear a song I will be transported back in my mind to the time and place when I first heard it. Some of these are a trip of almost sixty-years into the past.
I developed a habit of having a radio in each farm building. They are always on. That way I do not miss a song as I go from one building to another doing chores. They are all tuned to KRPR, 89.9. That is the classic rock station in Rochester. Classic rock without the talk, twenty-four hours a day. On five radios in five farm buildings all simultaneously cranking out the music. I do wear out radios every year, but the one in the shop is a Radio Shack boom box I have had since the mid 1980’s. It just keeps on running.
In Tennessee I listen to WTPR 101.7. The greatest hits of all time in Paris, Tennessee. They have the Swap Shop every morning six days week at 9am. It is like a hillbilly Facebook marketplace. But the best is a couple weeks before Christmas, they switch to all Christmas music, all the time, during the holiday season. Music is timeless and a very enjoyable part of life.
