Stan Hitchcock-View From A Long Time Ago-August 12, 2013

The Radio, pictured below, is a 1948 Zenith Transoceanic Radio, that lives in my music/fishing room at the Old Farm House. It was given to me by my brother Sam, who found it at a Garage Sale in Springfield, MO, and knew that it was the same as the one that I always talked about, from the days in 1954, when I left for the Navy and my folks, Big Stan and Ruby Ann, gave me one just like it to take on the ship with me. That was what my Mama said, “Would keep me in touch with Home.” That old original Radio got ruined when it was drenched in a wild Typhoon, off the Coast of Japan, in 1956.

You see, what Mama knew, was keeping in touch with home for me was listening to my radio. I was raised in the age of radio, 78 rpm records-turning later to 45’s, and local radio stations that had live musicians and singers on early in the morning, at noon, and in the late afternoon. Our local station, in Springfield, was KWTO, and during my growing up years, every major hillbilly singer you can imagine, spent some of their career time there. That’s the way it worked, in the 40’s and 50’s. A singer, like Little Jimmy Dickens, would move across the country, working different radio stations with a regular show, stay there for a year or two, booking out in a hundred mile radius of the station, selling their song and picture books, and then moving on to another town and another station. Their ultimate goal was to end up on WSM and the Grand Ole Opry. Springfield was a major stopping place for all of them. Of course, you would have the local stars who were from the area and stayed for their whole career, in our case it was Slim Wilson, Speedy Haworth, Doc Martin, Bob White, and groups such as the Tall Timber Trio, The Goodwill Family and comedy duo Flash and Whistler. Great entertainment to grow up with.

The first time I listened to the Grand Ole Opry would have been on our console radio in the living room of the farm house where I grew up. The family would sit in the living room and actually watch the radio, just like people watch TV today. On the Opry I would hear Roy Acuff, Ernest Tubb, Bill Monroe, The Fruit Jar Drinkers, Sam and Kirk McGee from Sunny Tennessee, as I imagined the square dancers swirling around the stage of the old Ryman Auditorium. I never dreamed that one day I would stand on that same stage, as evidenced by the picture below from 1961, singing one of my recordings, or that someday I would stand in a Nashville recording studio, made from an old War Surplus Quonset Hut, surrounded by the finest musicians and background vocalists the World of Music has ever known, all of them looking at me, waiting for me to sing another song, while they played and sang with me.

The old Zenith Transoceanic Radio that I carried half way around the World, did keep me connected to home. On one occasion, in Hong Kong Harbor, I set the radio up on the Fantail of the Ship, dialed the knob to 650 WSM, and there was Roy Acuff, singing “Wabash Cannonball”, with Brother Oswald’s country laugh in the middle, and me imagining Roy with his fiddle bow on his chin…..and it eased the homesickness that I had been feeling, being thousands of miles away from home.

So, yes, the old radio is just another appliance, past it’s time and put in somebody’s Garage Sale, but to me, it is a vault of remembrance, where I heard my first music, learned to love certain singers, sang along with Hank and Red, and went to sleep each night, in my attic room of the farm house, with music still running through my dreams, as the little bed side radio played on through the night. stan