Radio is something we take for granted today but I can remember, in the days before we had a television, sitting in the living room with mother and father listening to Boston Blackie and assorted other programs. Lunch was often eaten while listening to the Happy Gang and Ma Perkins. Saturday mornings the Lone Ranger rode the air waves.
Sunday, there was Fibber Magee and Molly and falling asleep to the music of the islands with Hawaii Calls.
One of my earliest radio memories centers around the day King George VI died: somber music played on the radio all day.
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I recently came across an article titled “Radio for the farm, the modern Aladdin’s lamp,” issued by Eaton’s Farm News Service which operated out of Winnipeg 70 years go.
The company archives say the news service started in 1927 or 1928 and “probably lasted for several years.”
There was also a series for the Maritimes and one from Montreal published in French.
The authors of the Eaton’s monograph on the radio cited many advantages for the farm dweller of years ago, echoes of which might be found in a mondern-day monograph on computers: “Radio has made it possible for us to have at our finger tips the latest market reports and quotations, enabling us to sell our products to the very best advantage. Help and instruction on modern scientific and more business-like methods of farming is now available to every farmer who has a radio set.”
The cost of a radio varied “from about $30 for a modest 2-tube table set to as high as $350 for an elaborate console model.” Country dwellers had it all over those who lived in the city when it came to reception because of “the absence of interference caused by steel frame buildings and the network of service wires found in every city today.”
“As the owner becomes more practised in tuning the set, the number of stations capable of being received will surprise even the most skeptical.
“If Winter evenings on the farm seem lonely and cheerless, by all means invest in a good radio set. You will then have all the company you desire, for, as a well-known battery company advertises, ‘The air is full of things you should not miss’. “
What goes around comes around. The air is still full of things we should not miss, only the internet has replaced the radio as the tool of choice for plucking out the gems.
