Freelance journalist Jack Hitt is a New Haven native, and I make sure to go and see him whenever he comes to Yale to talk. The last time was a discussion on all of the sky is falling/death of print journalism talk that’s reached a head lately, and during the talk Hitt said something I really liked about the progression of technology through which we access the world. I’d always seen radio as a sort of stepping stone towards television and the internet and everything that came after, our gateway into the big world of broadcast. And that’s true, but Hitt classified radio as part of the world of print. (He should know, too, he’s a big part of both worlds, and his This American Life programs are among the best recorded. Be sure to check out “The Super,” “Act Five,” and “Fiasco!” especially.)
Radio stories are edited like written pieces, and are word driven, making us imagine what we hear just like we do with books. This really struck me as significant, albeit something I should have realized long ago. That’s why I love radio so much! I mastered walking and reading, and roller blading and reading, and biking and reading, all at a young age (and only usually in the circle in front of my house, don’t worry. Also, no roller blading anymore, I’m a big kid. Also my skates broke) but reading and driving is thankfully beyond my grasp. Not that I’ve tried, that would be incredibly reckless and irresponsible. Except maybe at a particularly long red light, but that was only a couple times, promise.
Anyway. Great radio engages the mind just like a great book, and it can be a social experience in a way that most of us lost with books in our early childhood, when we stopped reading at bedtime with our parents. With radio, however, that experience can continue on. Here, then, is a brief history of my life with radio:
A Prairie Home Companion
I grew up listening to PHC in a house full of Garrison Keillor books, and I knew all the words to the Powdermilk biscuit song and Tishomingo Blues early on. We had cassette tapes of anniversary shows and listened at home and on car trips, and in May, 2004 my dad and I went down to Nashville to see the show live at the historic Ryman auditorium: birthplace of the Grand Ole Opry. I later learned exactly how important the Ryman was to the development of PHC. In 1974 Garrison went to William Shawn, then editor of the New Yorker (and one of my favorite people) and proposed writing an article about the last days of the Opry at the Ryman. From that article sprung Garrison’s desire to go home to Minnesota and start a similar show: an old time variety show, with voice actors, and sound effects, and music, and all the things that made early radio great. Later, when the Prairie Home movie came out we drove to Paducah to the nearest theater with a showing, and I loved it, despite Lindsay Lohan. A Prairie Home Companion was the first radio show I loved.
Car Talk
I was never really interested in cars when I was little, nor do I know anything about them now (I’ll work on it, I promise. It’s either that or learn how to build a Lincoln-esque split rail fence, I need the manliness boost) but I loved Car Talk from the first time I heard those grating Boston accents and those endless laughs. Car Talk is the best type of program centering around a single subject: engaging for aficionados and also immensely entertaining for a listening who doesn’t know a Night Rider from a Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. (Yes, I am aware those aren’t actual car models.) Most of all I love when they act like the prim-and-proper hoity-toity brass at NPR hate how well they do with a low-brow show about, of all things, cars. Speaking of, their cameos in the Pixar film were, in terms of sheer delight, one of my favorite movie moments.
This American Life
TAS was the first show I began listening to on my own, and the first I listened to primarily through the internet. At the time WKMS wasn’t yet carrying the show, and it was the first podcast I’d ever gotten on my ipod. My love for TAS came in the same spring I rediscovered my love of digging holes, but that’s something else entirely. As I’d dig, I’d listen to shows, one after the other, each one funny, and entertaining, and with a perspective I never would have seen on my own. At the same time, I discovered my trouble in explaining exactly why I loved the show so much. ”Well, see, each week they have a theme, and then several stories around that theme…it sounds a lot better when Ira Glass says it.” And there were such great themes! A show recorded on an aircraft carrier flying missions over Afghanistan. Shows about summer camp, and music lessons, and each year around Thanksgiving a show entirely devoted to poultry. And each episode filled with stories from real people, all put together in a way never done before on radio. My dad was a supportive, if not completely understanding participant when we went again to Paducah to see a live broadcast of the show, telecast all across the country into movie theaters. We were two of four people there, and for some reason the next time a telecast happened, the theater didn’t book the show. Oh well. For us, and for the nice couple sitting a few rows down, it was a great experience.
Radiolab
Remember how you felt in fourth grade when the class dissected owl pellets? (I may just be speaking for boys, I’m not sure if the girls were as enthused to put together all the little animal bones as we were) Or how neat it was the first time you got the microscope to work and saw all those things squirming around in the water drop? Science was something of wonder and awe when we were little, and somehow eventually that faded, for some of us. At some point in school kids that were once excited every day to go and see celery pull food-coloring tinted water from a glass lost that excitement. Radiolab recaptures that feeling of discovery and joy that those of us on the humanities side of things may have abandoned years ago. Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich do an amazing job of presenting new developments and research on a subject in a way that engages the listener and also doesn’t shortchange the great minds that have brought us to this point, featuring lots of interviews with scientists and experts in a format that isn’t in the slightest bit dry or bland. And again, with such great topics! My favorites are the single word titles: Sleep, Laughter, Placebo, even Parasites. Even now, we don’t fully understand how sleep works, or why we laugh. These are things that are a huge part of our everyday life, and most of us never even think of them except on a superficial level. Radiolab has dramatically changed how I view and experience the world, and it’s helped me to grow closer to the little guy out exploring in the backyard in his pith helmet and pocket-filled khaki vest that I once was.
Now then. I’m not sure what conclusion to arrive at from all of this, unless it’s that next time on a long car ride you might try setting aside Miley and Ke$ha and the rest (don’t worry, they’ll be fine while you’re gone) and find the nearest public radio station. Public radio: more enlightening then Ke$ha. If that isn’t fit to print on a fund drive tote, I don’t know what is.
