A few days ago a package arrived in the mail containing a
vintage Philco Ford clock radio made in 1966.
I had been looking for this particular model of clock radio on and off
for the best part of the last decade.
The search was sparked by my memories.
Memories from my childhood and early adults years which, truth be told, was
over 30 years ago. The search was made all
the more difficult as all I had to go on were these distant memories. I didn’t know the brand name. I couldn’t have described the radio to
another person except for a vague idea that it was white, rectangular, and it
had a circular clock face with a second hand that went all the way across it. These recollections drifted in the back of my
mind as I indulged my quest for mid-century modern items for my current bedroom
and home office space.
The tanker desk and orange desk chair were the first items
of my buying spree. These were followed
by a credenza located on Craigslist, and matching highboy dresser that I
splurged on and had shipped in from Dallas, Texas. A vintage orange lamp soon graced one corner
of the desk. Then two orange side chairs
arrived in a box from Grand Rapids; the Fed Ex delivery man felt he had to give
me a schooling on how the chairs should have been packed better. Next, I started looking for a vintage radio that
could sit on my sturdy tanker desk. One
evening while browsing through the online auctions of mid-century clock radios,
one caught my eye, and like the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle slipping into
place, the picture of this clock radio caused my distant childhood memories to
come racing to the fore of my brain. I
had found face of the clock that had been ticking away in the corners of my
memories.
These memories had become lodged in my brain during the
summer that I turned 13. My younger
brother, my first cousin from Baltimore, and I were spending our summer
vacations with my grandmother on her farm in the Appalachian mountains outside
of Martinsburg, WV. That was the summer
that I spent listening to music on my late grandfather’s clock radio. Before he passed away from black lung, the radio
had sat on a table by his chair in the living room. After he passed away, the clock radio found a
home on the kitchen table. I used to
love listening to it in the mornings and at night it would sit on a window sill
so that we could hear the music while we sat on the porch and watched the
fireflies in the yard and the rolling meadow beyond. With my grandmother’s permission, and her indulgence,
that clock radio moved with me from room to room filling my first teenage
summer with music. I especially remember
the muggy afternoons lying on my bed listening to the rain coming down and the
thunder following the lightening as it provided accompaniment to the songs on
the radio. As summer drew to a close and
it was time for my brother and I to return home, I asked my grandmother if I
could take that clock radio home with me.
Again indulging her eldest grandson, she let me have the radio as a
birthday present.
While growing up, on that radio I listened to the local news, lunch
reports, snow day announcements, Doctor Demento, late night radio mysteries,
and so very, very much music. However, just
like my first teenage summer came to a close, so did my high school years and
as I was preparing to go off to college, I tucked that clock radio safely away
on the top shelf of my bedroom closet.
After an unsuccessful freshman year and then another year living on my
own, my parents asked me to come home and patch up our strained relations. I agreed and after packing two cardboard
boxes, I caught a Greyhound bus in Allentown and headed home. While getting settled back into my old room,
I thought again of the clock radio and decided to get it out and put it on the
desk were it had sat before. Much to my
dismay, the clock radio, along with a few other vintage radios that I had
collected, was gone. After some
investigation, I found that my younger brother and a friend of his decided that
it would be fun to melt down those, to them, useless old radios and play with
the molten solder. Just envisioning the burning plastic and Bakelite still
makes me sick to my stomach. With a
total disregard, my brother stole a reminder of my grandparents and of my childhood
summers and sent it up in flames and oily black smoke.
Over the intervening years, I have thought of that radio and
now realize that its absence had made as much of an impact on my life as it
presence did during my childhood. While
my grandfather’s radio is as gone as the smoke of the fire it burnt up in, I
can still see it in my mind’s eye sitting on the shelf in the closet where I
placed it awaiting future days. And
while there is no way to go back in time and retrieve it in actuality, I now see
its twin setting on my desk 30 years removed from my childhood.
