It's February of 1955, I'm back on the fantail of my ship, USS Bryce
Canyon (AD-36), looking at all the lights against the mountain rising
out of the Sea that is Hong Kong, I've been a year away
from home, I'll soon be 19 years old, and I'm pretty dang homesick.
The night is black as pitch, but all the lights from the mountain town
give a soft glow to everything, with a little fog around the peak.
That very day I received a package from my Ozark home, and it is
something that is very special to me. It is a 1948 Zenith TransOceanic
radio that the folks had bought me a couple of years before and Mom had
packaged it up with love and shipped it all the way to Hong Kong...which
to her was like shipping it to the moon. I had strung up a wire
antenna to a metal post on the back of the ship and was ready to plug
the radio in and see if I could get it to work. I sat down on a pile of
rope coiled on the deck and pushed the power button.
Static...static....more static...as I slowly turned the dial looking for
anything that might have an English accent to it...static....Chineese
gibberish....Chineese music....static...wait! what was that...fine
tuning the dial I heard the voice of the Solemn Old Judge Hays, as he
introduced the next portion of the Grand Ole Opry, with host Roy Acuff
and the Smoky Mountain Boys! I was so excited I forgot to
breathe...this was home...just like I listened to every Saturday Night
back in my Attic bedroom on the Ozark farm where I grew up....
I sat there on that pile of rope, tears in my eyes misting up the lights of Hong Kong, and listened for hours..til at last the atmospheric skip that had given me access, shifted somehow and I lost the signal...to static. But, today, all these years later, the memory is still so fresh in my mind of what that small connection meant to me at that particular time of homesick Navy life. I still marvel at the turn of events that took me, only 8 years later, to that same stage, again with Mr Roy Acuff and the Smoky Mountain Boys, only this time Mr Acuff was saying, "Well now neighbors, we have a young feller here from the Ozarks that's gonna come out and sing his brand new record for y'all, make him welcome.....Stan Hitchcock!!" I've often wondered, was there some young man somewhere in the world, hunkered over a radio, listening in homesick attention as I sang my songs that night, and did his eyes mist up also.......Stan
I sat there on that pile of rope, tears in my eyes misting up the lights of Hong Kong, and listened for hours..til at last the atmospheric skip that had given me access, shifted somehow and I lost the signal...to static. But, today, all these years later, the memory is still so fresh in my mind of what that small connection meant to me at that particular time of homesick Navy life. I still marvel at the turn of events that took me, only 8 years later, to that same stage, again with Mr Roy Acuff and the Smoky Mountain Boys, only this time Mr Acuff was saying, "Well now neighbors, we have a young feller here from the Ozarks that's gonna come out and sing his brand new record for y'all, make him welcome.....Stan Hitchcock!!" I've often wondered, was there some young man somewhere in the world, hunkered over a radio, listening in homesick attention as I sang my songs that night, and did his eyes mist up also.......Stan
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