Out with the Old, In with the New

“Radio is theater of the mind…”  ~ Steve Allen

After World War 1, a new household item was taking hold – the radio.  Here was a cabinet (had to be large enough for vacuum tube technology) that a family could sit around to find out the news and to be entertained.  There were serial stories, music from ballrooms, sketch comedies…the key was you had to listen and use your imagination to fill in the blanks.  By the time World War II broke out, a majority of households had radios and radios were also available in cars.  By the mid-50’s, transistor technology came into play and the portable radio came into existence.  However, time and technology does not stand still and the Television started to become popular.  My parents told the stories how everything seemed to stop when Milton Berle’s weekly television show came on the air.  Radio stars were starting to make the jump to television (like Jack Benny, Ozzy and Harriett) as well as radio shows (like the Lone Ranger, Dragnet).

Technology changed (“Who Moved My Cheese?”) and people went from radio to television.  The full quote by Steve Allen is, “Radio is the theater of the mind; television is the theater of the mindless.”  The creative aspect of radio was now replaced by the visual aspect of the newer medium.  Fortunately, radio became the source of music, news and talk radio and continues to exist.  This is a great example of accepting change, changing the focus and finding a way to still be relevant.  I remember, a number of years ago, my brother-in-law walking around with a portable radio just so that he could listen to sporting events.  That was before the boom of internet and the existence of smartphones.

So why write about the radio?  As I get older, I have had the opportunity to see enough technology changes to where new “things” have overtaken those items we grew up with.  Home-hard wired phones, the typewriter, rabbit-ears, mimeographs (loved the smell), a Polaroid, 45’s, Spirograph, etc.  have all marched off into the sunset.  Or, to be more exact, have been replaced by mobile phones, computers, satellite / cable, copiers, digital cameras, streaming music / YouTube, the iPad, etc.  In the world of on-demand, I can always listen to my favorite radio shows (streaming, podcasts, etc.) and my favorite television shows (computer, Netflix, etc.).  As a group of my friends were sitting around talking recently, we realized that radio still matters to many of us.  It still exists and we will always need to have audio transmissions send us things we can hear.  Like many other advancements, we may not recognize initially where they came from, nor will our progeny know the terms, what we know today might still exist tomorrow.  In the question of “Does radio still matter?” – Radio might not be the way it once was, nor how we remembered it, but it will transform into the way it will become.  We might be in with the new, but if we lift up the cover, we might find the old is still there.