Radio has played a big role in my life since childhood

By John Toth

The Bulletin

I have found the almost-perfect radio, although my search continues for true perfection - for a good price, of course, preferably on sale.

I have been a radio fan most of my life. My parents would secretly listen to Radio Free Europe broadcasts into Hungary in the early 1960s. I remember seeing them huddling close to the set and listening to the news in the mornings before they went to work.

It was illegal to receive those broadcasts in Hungary back in those days. But the Eastern Europeans who were able to get their hands on a shortwave radio did so, anyway. My parents, both factory workers, managed to get one from somewhere.

After my mother and I escaped to Vienna, Austria, she bought a cheap AM transistor radio, and we listened to it almost all the time, mostly to a classical station on the AM band.

 As I learned the language, which is German there, I switched to listening to other stations that had more talk than music.

Once arriving in the USA in 1967, one of the first things we bought was an AM radio. Someone gave us a kitchen tube radio, but it only worked for short periods of time. I even built from a kit a crystal radio that uses the power of the received radio signal to produce sound, without needing any external power source. It was a nice toy, but not practical. Our go-to was the small battery operated AM radio.

That’s all we needed back then. All the music and sports broadcasts were on the AM band. The sound was tinny, but you could take it anywhere. Motown, I’ve read a while back, even engineered its records to sound good being played over the AM band.

We had FM also, but it was for more serious listeners. Those stations played album rock, Broadway soundtracks and classical music. I liked all that, but at first, we just stuck to AM. That’s all we knew.

I have taken a portable radio with me everywhere I’ve traveled. I even take one with me on cruises and tune into the local stations at the different ports. My Spanish is not good enough to understand a lot of it, but I still like listening to the broadcasts. They take me back to the days when I hardly understood any of the broadcasts in Vienna.

As a preteen, I used to take radios apart and try to figure out what was wrong with them. If it was just a broken wire or a dirty contact, I could fix them. But changing out a capacitor, resistor or a transistor was above my pay grade until high school, when I took an electronics course to better understand how those parts work.

I had thrown away all my early day radios, but a few years ago, I started buying radios made in the 1960s and ‘70s. My main source is eBay, where I can buy just about any type of radio I want, from any decade.

 I actually bought an AM/FM radio that I had through high school and college. It looks the same, sounds the same, and I still listen to Astros games on it, like I used to listen to baseball games on the original one.

But I realized recently that I really want a radio that is high-tech, small and has certain features. I bought a half dozen from Amazon, thinking that I hit the jackpot, until I wanted something else.

I have several HD radios that receive digital signals, since in Houston that’s the only way to listen to classical music broadcasts. I know that there are other sources, but I want to listen to it on a small, portable radio, just like I used to do in Vienna.

Then I found a WiFi radio on sale on Amazon and bought it just to try it out. I tuned it to pick up all the Hungarian and Austrian stations I listened to in my childhood. The music is different, but that’s O.K. It’s the nostalgia that counts.

I found what I was looking for. It’s small, uses batteries and plugs into the wall, has an alarm, snooze function, FM,  a clock and sends a stereo signal to a headphone or earphone. What more could I ask for? Well, a few things, but I’ll take it like it is.

 Wherever I can get a WiFi signal, my world from the 1960s opens back up again. That is priceless.

And, it was on sale. That makes it almost perfect.