Radio days

While I was going through my old photos, I came across the photo I had been looking for of my older brother standing next to an Opel Rekord with a radio on the bonnet. Memories came flooding back of those good ‘ol radio days.

After fetching my brother from his school hostel in Windhoek, Oupa Linger would have stopped on the side of the road on the way to the farm to listen to the radio. It played an important part in his life and he listened to the news broadcasts throughout the day. My brother, with his 60s hairdo, would often get lifts with him to spend the weekend with the family.

I remember one night when Oupa Linger was visiting, I went outside to find him listening to the radio in the dark. It was the momentous moon landing and he told me how Armstrong was about to step onto the moon, making history.

As I grew older, I also became hooked on the radio, especially music, and mostly rock ‘n roll and pop music. Friday night was the most exciting day of the week because it was when David Gresham counted down the Top20 on Springbok Radio. Gresham was a popular radio DJ who, besides bringing music into people’s homes and inspiring listeners with his well-used line ‘Keep your feet on the ground and reach for the stars’, was the only South African DJ to be granted an interview with Beatles musician, John Lennon. Lennon apologised to Springbok Radio and its listeners for saying that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus Christ, a remark that caused them to be banned in South Africa in 1966.

Knowing my passion for collecting mementos, people often bring me old items, and a short while ago a kind-hearted woman stopped by the office and gave me her old Phillips transistor radio. When I saw it, I immediately recognised it as the same one that Oupa Linger travelled with and I knew that I had the photo packed away somewhere.

It made me realise how much things have changed in the last century and made me think about the radio, which was so much a part of our lives as we grew up. As with most inventions several people are credited with inventing the radio, but it was Guglielmo Marconi in 1894 who came up with building long-distance wireless transmission systems using radio (or Hertzian) waves. At first, he was only capable of transmitting signals of half a mile, but he persevered and by 1898 he was able to open a ‘wireless’ factory in Chelmsford, England. He held the patent rights for radio and won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1909. With the invention of the transistor in 1947, small hand-held radios hit the market, allowing people to listen to the radio wherever they were and billions of radios were manufactured and sold over the subsequent years.

Today, even with TV having come and (nearly) gone and the advancements in digital technology, people still listen to the radio in their cars or on their cell phones, and often in the rural areas you will come across a radio in a field, providing lively accompaniment as people tend their crops.

It seems that the radio has survived, although to a lesser degree and regardless of the world moving on, and there are many still grateful for the connection it provides with the rest of the world.

(References: History of radio-Wikipedia; Transistor radio-Wikipedia; Interview with David Gresham – The Gruesome Gresh! – Pop Speaking)