Solid State Transistor Radio

It was called a “Spy Pen Radio” and it was tucked in the back pages of my comic books.  Along with “X-Ray Specs” (invented by a known Neo-Nazi) and other cool things.  Like hovering cars and sea-monkeys and other things that fed the imagination of eight year-old boys.  Items that were either “pranks” or innovative creations that somehow never made it big to the masses and had to be sold to children not old enough yet to drive or have a checking account.

Meh...never worked....

I don’t know how I got my hands on my “Spy Radio Pen” but it must have been a mix of cajoling, begging, saving my birthday or Christmas money or doing “odd jobs” around the house (shining my step-father’s shoes was usually good for a couple bucks).  And saving money wasn’t really my forte.  What with pinball machines at the local bowling alley (no longer exists) reaching out their glowing images of large breasted women and the tantalizing sound of bells and dings and, if you’re lucky, the KNOCK! of a winning game.

Oh....man.  So much cool stuff.

There were many a pull to my purse strings, candy from the “Vita-Del” Market just down the street (don’t know if it still exists), French fries from a place called “Mustards Last Stand” (no longer exists) or catching a matinee at the Bay movie theater (still exists).

So how I got my hands on that “Spy Radio Pen” is still murky in the recesses of my mind.  But got it, I did.

Never bought this.  Should have.

When it arrived it was quite large for a “pen” and I don’t think it had ink it.  So pen as in shape but not pen as in reality.

Pulling out the white (or off-white and soon to be yellowed with ear wax) ear-phone, I shoved it in my ear and tried to tune it to get a radio station.  Alas, the few moments of pulling in the signal didn’t amount to anything of note.  Maybe static, if that.

Actually, had some of these.  Not very trainable.

Reading the instructions I figured out that I needed an antenna.  Just like James Bond might pull an antenna from his watch or eye glasses or cuff-links, this “Spy Radio Pen” needed that extra boost to bring down the bad guys.

A pen.  Kinda.

My “antenna” was a metal wire that dangled from the pen like silver thread.  Silver “save the world from the bad guys” thread.  (Plus, it didn't need batteries.  I mean, if you're saving the world, you can't stop and get batteries, amIright?)

Trying it out on various objects around the house, I finally headed outside and found a faucet spigot attached to the house.  I held the wire to the rusted metal as best as any spy could and turned the tuning knob.  Faintly the sounds of the world came into being and it worked.  Toys, and even Spy Radio Pens, at this point in a child’s life had very little shelf life.  Seemed they would be new and broken within hours.  Or, most likely, they didn’t live up to the hype (I’m looking at YOU “X-Ray Specs!”).  To actually buy a Spy Radio Pen and to actually have it WORK is, trust me, a miracle for anything bought out of a page in a comic book.  Even if, by being a spy, I had to nonchalantly attach a wire to a spigot.

This opened the world of radio-ness.  Soon after the Spy Pen Radio we moved on to the “crystal” radio.  Heck, if you could have a pen be a radio, than what would be better but a CRYSTAL be a radio.  Plus, I guess, it would teach me something about science or something.

Yes, I had this.  Made by "Science Fair" so you know it's gotta be full of science.

Crystal radio kits were basic contraptions that took very little putting together and entailed a couple wires, diodes, and the “soon to be yellowed with ear wax” off-white ear phone.  Tuning be damned!  Volume be damned!  This was SCIENCE I’m talking about here.  Good ol’ fashioned “hey, Billy, let’s make something out of small rocks!” science.  In short time I had gone from master spy to master scientist.  If I wasn’t going to save the world with my tethered spy radio pen, I was going to take over the world with my mastery of crystals.  BWAHAHAHAHAHA!

Eventually I grew up and learned that with a 9-volt battery and $5 I could buy a radio that actually had a tuner, a volume control and a bunch of stations on something called “AM.”  What AM stood for, I’m sure I knew at some point, but I’m avoiding Wikipedia at this moment to try and appear smart because, seriously, I have no idea what AM meant.  Frequency something?  And then, if you wanted to spend another $5 or so, you could get FM radio (I have no idea what FM means).  $10 more and you could get STEREO but that entailed a bigger radio and two speakers and possibly going from one 9-volt to four AA batteries and that’s going to take quite a bit out of one’s candy/movie/pinball budget.

Basic AM/FM Radio

(My ten year-old fascination with walkie-talkies was short lived and best left to another blog.)

AM Radio in the Seattle market in the 1970’s basically had one station:  KJR.  And I listened to it constantly.  There may have been other stations:  KIRO, KING, ??? but I didn’t know it or didn’t listen to it.  KJR was the thing.  And somewhere I learned that stations EAST of the Mississippi were named with “W”s while stations WEST of the Mississippi were named with “K”s.

Radio and yellow-stained ear phone in hand, many a day was spent dancing and playing and listening to the hits of the day or, on the weekend, “American Top 40!” with Casey Kasem.

Trust me, this was a thing.

Once FM hit, it didn’t entice me.  AM and KJR were still my best buds.  Older kids listened to FM.  I’m sure my brother did.  And then came the rumor that there was a radio with “short wave.”  I didn’t truly knew what that meant, but that sounded decadent.  It’s SHORT and it’s WAVE.  It had to be diabolically cool because, as I soon learned, you could pick up radio stations from AROUND THE WORLD!  Be still my heart!  You mean me, in a suburb of Seattle could pull in the world of Japan, my birthplace?  Or Russia, our dreaded cold war enemy.  Or other?  What about outer space?  I’m certain that, if I had a radio with short wave, I’d hear aliens planning their attack on us.  Just me.  I would hear it and go screaming down Market Street yelling about the coming invasion like the boy who cried wolf.  No one would pay attention to me (“Why should we pay attention to him, he doesn’t even know what AM stands for!”) and then it would be…too…late.

With Short Wave and, be still my heart, TV!  Who doesn't want to listen to the TV on a radio? 

I don’t think I ever had a short wave radio when I was a child.  Best to leave that mix of imagination and technology to someone with less of a paranoid version of aliens attacking at any moment.  Let some other kid freak out.

Beyond the short wave was the HAM radio which, not only let you listen to radio stations from around the world but to actually COMMUNICATE with people from around the world.  That was just too much for this boy to handle in his basement room, his Radio Shack AM radio tuned to KJR.  (Note, I would occasionally turn away from KJR to listen to the Dr. Demento show – but my brother knew where to find him and what station he was on.  Also, my brother liked to listen to 1940’s music.  He was such a square.)

Dr. Demento - Kind of the equivalent of the American Top 40, but it was 10 or 20 songs and they were silly.

After moving away from Ballard and the shifting interest from AM Radio to things like girls and sports and school and girls the importance of radio technology slipped into a realm of forgotteness.  It wasn’t like it WASN’T there.  It’s just that it became commonplace.  KJR was replaced by KZOK or KISW hard rock stations on (GASP!) FM or I was busy joining up with Columbia House to get 12 Tapes for $1 and listening to music via tape or record instead of pre-packaged top 40 hits.

Bottom line, radios weren’t special anymore. Spy Pen, Crystal, Short Wave, Ham or whatever.  Oh, sure, they were THERE – some even in a form called “boom box” and I still listened but the novelty had worn off like ink in a comic book.

Box, thy name is "boom."

As of this writing, I have one radio that would qualify for the above.  It’s a Sony battery powered radio with plug-in AC adapter.  AM and FM.  Quite large, but not stereo.  With an antenna that you pull out of the top and twist around to get the best reception.  (most of my old radios I would break the antenna off by accident within hours of taking it out of the package)

I use this radio when we go camping or when I’m outside and want to listen to a sporting event.  No music.  No KJR, KISW, KZOK.  Listening to radio music is left to the vehicles in the family.

A larger crystal radio set with, presumably, more science.

Recently we had a wind storm that knocked out power for over 24 hours.  I got out the trusty radio to get updates on what was going on with the power recovery and other news.  We soon found out that mother didn’t have a battery powered AM/FM radio.  What?

With my mother’s birthday coming up, Miriam and I decided we’d get her a battery powered AM/FM radio.  She’s 82 and should have SOME access to what is going on in the outside world.

A trip to the local hardware store?  Nope.  Sporting Goods store?  Nope.  Radio Shack?  Nope (it had closed down).  Big Lots?  Nope.  Grocery Outlet?  Nope.  I finally found one at a Rite Aid drug store but it was $40 and way too big for what she needed.

Certainly we could go online to Amazon or order one from a catalog (which we eventually did), but there was something about the lack of finding a cheap AM/FM (heck, I would have been okay with just AM) battery powered radio that just seemed, I don’t know, wrong.  As if part of my childhood had disappeared into a world of portable MP3 players and cellphones and DVRs and blu-ray players and I didn’t notice.  And I find that kind of sad.

Long live small portable battery powered AM radios – even if I still have no idea what AM (or FM for that matter) actually means.