As far back as I can remember, my darkroom has always featured a radio. And because my first darkroom was only truly dark at night, I’d tune into “Night Flight” on KRLD from Dallas, Texas. Thanks to ionospheric bounce, a radio station 1,200 miles from my home in Price, Utah, came in clearly—clearer, even, than our local station KOAL, whose 250-watt broadcast tower was less than three miles away.
“Night Flight” featured soothing, easy listening music interspersed with equally soothing patter from a velvet-voiced D.J. It was the perfect accompaniment to the gentle agitations required for proper film development.
Daytimes, we retuned our Crosleys to KOAL, which was part of the Mutual Broadcasting Network. Pretty much every housewife in town was an honorary member of Don McNeill’s Breakfast Club, and in time I became addicted as well. In the summer of 1961, before setting out to peddle my one-speed Schwinn 200 miles to Panguitch, I had lashed a portable transistor radio on loan from my girlfriend to the handlebars. My fondest memory from that trip was cruising south on U.S. 89 while singing along to “That Old Bilbao Moon.”
Fast forward to the summer of 1966. I was living in the basement of the Cadillac Motel in South Salt Lake City, where I had found work as a route salesman for The Jewel Tea Company. It was a job for which I was ill-suited and one I absolutely hated. On the dashboard of my step van was a Sony transistor radio, which I kept tuned to Joe Pyne’s call-in talk show. Unlike Don McNeill or Arthur Godfrey, Pyne’s on air persona was far from folksy. Hippies, homosexuals, liberals and feminists were ridiculed. Callers who begged to differ were smacked down. Among Pyne’s trademark insults was, “Go gargle with razor blades.”
What was it about Pyne that so captivated me? Looking back on it, I see clearly that I tuned into Pyne because I wallowing in misery. I hated my job and had only taken it in order to finance my dream of pursuing an MFA at the University of The Americas in Mexico City, which had accepted my application.
That dream failed to materialize because at summer’s end I had saved only about four hundred dollars. So instead of going to graduate school, I suffered a nervous breakdown, after which I bought myself a cheap guitar and rented a small room on University Street in hopes of putting some distance between myself and all those desperate suburban housewives to whom I had pitched such useless objects as foam rubber dish daisies and nonstick “Tuffram” cookware. Instead of listening to Joe Pyne, I strummed my guitar, and by and by my mental state began to improve.
Fast forward fifty years. Today I live in a leafy neighborhood sandwiched between the University of Utah and Westminster College. My neighbors include a member of the Utah Symphony, two artists, a college professor, two dancers, a member of the Saliva Sisters quartet, a gay Italian medical translator, a Harley riding social worker. Within walking distance is an independent bookstore, a bagel shop, a gelato creamery, a French restaurant, a middle Eastern restaurant and an Italian delicatessen—all three featuring outdoor tables. No one who sits at those tables listens to AM radio—and as a result, no one in my neighborhood is miserable.
Recently I had occasion to venture out of my comfort zone. My motorcycle was at a repair shop at the south end of valley—my old Jewel Tea route—and my wife was driving me there so that I could pick it up. Along the way, we stopped at a convenience store because she had to use the restroom. While I waited in the car, a brown step van pulled up alongside and parked. Its driver dashed into the store, leaving his engine—and radio—running. For the next five minutes I was forced to endure the barbaric yawp of Rush Limbaugh.
It suddenly dawned on me that had things gone differently back in the summer of 1966, that sad person driving the brown step van could very well have been me. Let’s say that instead of having a nervous breakdown, I’d have married the boss’s daughter, whom I was dating at the time. Thanks to my father-in-law, I’d have progressed up the corporate ladder from miserable route salesman to equally miserable regional supervisor of a home shopping service that was rapidly falling out of fashion. My wife, like her mother before her, would have become an alcoholic. Our kids? They, too, would be leading lives of quiet desperation. And without a doubt, all of us would be tuned in to that inflated windbag of a bullshit artist named Rush Limbaugh.
