Tune In

Sometimes when I am stuck waiting for my wife to come back to the car from some errand or other, I sit in the passenger seat and slowly go up and down the dial of the radio: first on FM, then on AM. This is a fairly mindless task primarily because the car radio has a digital tuner. It is a simple matter to push the "seek" button and let the frequency elves do their magic. Back in the olden days, it was a much more exacting exercise. When you had to turn the dial just so, and the antenna really had to work.
In my youth, I can remember listening to a station primarily because it had a signal strong enough to reach me in the mountains of Colorado. KOA in Denver could blow out the screen doors on mobile homes from Grand Junction to Scottsbluff with fifty thousand watts of power. The fact that it was primarily news and sports didn't keep me from listening. They were the voice of the Denver Bears, Broncos and Nuggets. It was the sound of my summers.
There were some alternatives. We listened to KHOW, especially on Friday afternoons when "Hot Dog" Harold Moore would kick of the "Wonderful Weekend In The West" by playing "If I Had a Wagon I Would Go to Colorado." If we were very lucky, he'd even throw in "Rocky Mountain High" for good measure. There were some late nights when we twisted the knob just right and got KIMN, but listening to pop music was a luxury for the flat-landers. Up high in the Rockies the signals were battered, scattered, and ruined before they ever made it out of our speakers. We satisfied ourselves with the news, weather, traffic and sports that we could get, and savored those moments when a song might seep through the static from an era that we might all recognize.
Nowadays, when I'm tuning around, trying to find nothing in particular, I am amazed at the lack of open space on the dial. There isn't much I want to listen to. Not all of it is in English. Clear Channel owns both KHOW and KOA now. Local radio personalities have given way to feeding stations for the pointy-headed twits and their rants. Talk radio. I'm still out there, looking for a song.