Midnight Mutterings | Radio

||| MIDNIGHT MUTTERINGS by JACKIE BATES |||

The news today is that CBS Radio News, which was founded in 1928, is now kaput. Really? Is that even possible? As I am writing this on Friday night, 3/20/2026, I am also reading this news. All staff will be laid off as a result. I assume that CBS television will continue at least for now…

Radio has always been important in my life. My natal family was later than most to come to television. I think it was partly because reception was difficult in the middle of the seventy acres of trees outside of Raleigh, North Carolina, although a nine inch black and white TV in a giant cabinet did appear not long before I disappeared to schools in Virginia and Chapel Hill, where I could barely understand what other students who had grown up with television were talking about.

But there was radio in my earliest memories. When I lived with my father near the Cape Fear River, we had a radio in a tall cabinet, not unlike that later nine inch screen on the TV that was half the size of a fridge that came later. My father was a patient and gentle teacher, an engineer, who wasn’t interested in traditional sex roles. He taught me to read before I was four years old. He used newspapers and comic strips for that. He tried hard to teach me how things worked, less successfully. Radio was one of those things. My father showed me the big tubes on the back of the big radio, which I still don’t understand and he took the large speaker out so I could see and touch it. I was impressed by its warmth and the way it moved under my small fingers when the voices came out. Still I couldn’t understand the magic and could only surmise that somehow the people who spoke had made themselves tiny and were inside the speaker. (That still seems the most plausible explanation, in spite of college physics.) I do remember hearing at least one Fireside Chat by Franklin Roosevelt and how my father tried to explain the Presidency of the United States with maps and newspapers. I was a poor student for that. How could the president be in the Capitol building is a far away place and in the speaker of that big radio at the same time? (My father taught me other things that were more useful. For example: If you shut yourself in a hot car and your hands are not strong enough to open the door, it’s a good idea to roll down the window before you die.) In spite of my precocious reading, I was dangerously dim about practical stuff.

As life went on and I got bigger and radios got smaller, there came a time when my life was primarily radio life. In sixth grade, I spent a month in hospital with various illnesses that culminated in hepatitis. Discharged just before Thanksgiving, I learned three things: One: if your aren’t around to protect him, your family will eat your huge pet turkey. Two: the radio is your best friend if you are home, mostly alone, on a non-fat diet for several months before you can return to school. And three: Math involving fractions will remain mysterious for a long time if you skip part of sixth grade. While my friends were living with Leave It To Beaver and Lassie, I was soaking in soap operas, and Sky King and The Lone Ranger. When I married an actor far too young, I was fully prepared by Backstage Wife, The Story of Mary Noble.

Even after I did have TV, radio stayed important, especially when I moved to Waldron Island in the late eighties. A single space on the dial brought me both NPR and Canadian Public Radio, depending on AM or FM. Radio was particularly important on those long winter nights because reading in bed by kerosene lamp light is remarkably difficult and dangerous. My favorite was St Paul Sunday’s classical music, which was often narrated by Jon Kimura Parker, who is featured in the Summer Classical Music Festivals on Orcas and lives around the corner from me at Obstruction Pass when he and his family are here. No, I’ve never met him. Canadian Radio was a lot less interesting to me. At that time, all the news was about the Peace River Accord, which I didn’t understand then and don’t understand now, and have no idea how or if it was ever resolved.

I haven’t had TV after moving to Orcas Island in 1990, and radio was my source of news and entertainment, until I had a functional computer and the internet.

But back to CBS Radio News. Famous news reporter Edward R. Murrow was on the air from 1928-1951 when he moved to television. He is best known for his reporting before and during WWII, with much of his time spent in London. (One interesting aside: His birth name was Egbert until he changed it to Edward at age 20.) Some TV news clips and photos show him smoking while reporting with a big overflowing ashtray. He died of lung cancer at age fifty three. (Aw, reading about him revealed we share a birthday.) You can read about him and see his baby picture) here.

I didn’t listen to radio news in those early bedridden months, preferring Bob and Ray. Barely age 21, I moved to New York City, living way uptown near Columbia Medical School. One day early on, I found an old cabinet radio on the street just like the one in my early childhood. A friend helped me drag it back to my apartment before I realized it had no plug. Too impatient to shop, I just stripped the wires a little, separated them and stuck them in a socket and it worked just fine without setting fire to the apartment. Later, I moved to the lower east side and the radio was too heavy to take along. In the way of things then, I just put it back on the street still minus a plug. (Later, when we moved back to NYC after our first baby was born in Detroit, we found a three sided crib on the street. We just washed it down and nailed it to the wall. Again, back to the street when we moved to New Hampshire.)

I’m not sure when I began listening to radio news on a daily basis, but there have been periods of time we didn’t have television on principle when our kids were small, thus depriving them of the universal cultural experience of their peers. (Of course they watched TV at their friends’ houses and the so-called adults were probably the ones actually deprived.)

Now I begin my mornings with radio news. Which meant that on February 28, 2026, I woke up to the news: President Trump along with his sometimes friend Netanyahu were attacking Iran with drones. Waking to war was such a shock. Even I know that only the Congress can legally declare war according to the Constitution of the United States. I might just have to delay radio news until after coffee for the time being. One comforting thought: I don’t worry about President Trump being able to make himself small enough to hide in my iPhone, my current radio.