When I was a kid my grandpa had this big radio with lots of knobs and switches and numbers on it, more than a regular radio. We used to listen to it in the kitchen/ den where the dinner table was. It was where we always sat to visit and eat have coffee... play cards. When I was about 12 I asked about that radio and was told that it was a short wave radio. It could get stations all over the world! It had aircraft CB, police and regular old AM/FM radio too. I didn't know anything about antennas, so I would take it out into the shed and find some kind of wire and just wrap it around the end of one of the whip antennas that stuck out of the top. One time my cousin and I strung wire clear across the backyard and hooked it to a chain link fence. Never mind if it made any difference in reception, I was certain it did, and I heard stations in Germany and France and Great Britain, especially at night.
When I was in high school... or college grandpa bought me my own short wave radio - a Realistic DX-30, and a long wire antenna to go with it. I still didn't have a clue what to do with an outboard antenna. Grandpa had never been much of a short wave listener, and until this writing I had always thought the radio had been a freebie because it had a Readers Digest logo on it. I had always assumed it was a premium for renewing a subscription. Grandma and Grandpa had ALWAYS had a subscription to Readers digest. But upon further research, I found that the magazine did - at one time - have a line of home electronics. This radio dates from the mid 70s and was manufactured by a company in Hong Kong known for making a popular low cost short wave radio set which has been hailed by current day radio collectors as "junk."
I didn't know from radios back then, so to me Grandpa's radio was amazing! It did more than any radio I had ever seen. And my little Radio Shack gem didn't do much more or much better. It did have a clock and an alarm and a digital display and memories.... and that long wire antenna never did get put up. In fact, I didn't use the radio too terribly much until I was in grad school and I had met someone online, a guy in the Czech Republic. This was before online dating. I just found his webpage and he seemed interesting, and I sent him an email and soon we were friends, and then we were "dating" and suddenly the little short wave radio was a way to listen to Czech radio. (This was a couple years before online audio streaming. Remeber RealAudio player?)
I had just started grad school and Dr. Hall, a total radio enthusiast had reminded me of the whole short wave thing. Here I had decided to go to grad school to kill some time and be back home with friends and maybe go into teaching or general academics, and suddenly I was obsessed with the Czech Republic and short wave radio. Before this I didn't even know what a QSL card or a signal report was!! Now Radio Prague was on my radar. I even wrote them a letter which they read on the air! I felt so important and amazed. I remember my enthusiastic email to Ivan about it.
One year later my relationship with him had come to an end, but I wasn't done with the Czech Republic. I must have been a glutton for punishment. I could not even sound the depths of my own broken heart. As I pursued my amateur radio studies, I kept listening to radio Prague, and even made friends with an American ex-patriate who had been one of their English service announcers for many years... since before the Czech Republic even existed. I found out from Bill that they were so hard up for listener letters that if I had sent in my water bill, they probably would have read it on the air. So I wrote them a letter now and then, or an email, so they'd have something to read. And with my knowledge of Prague (from my travels of the previous summer) I made audio recordings of my own version of myself anouncing for radio Prague and sent in an audio cassette, which I think they played on the air. By the end of my last summer in grad school I had talked them into letting me come there to do an internship.
So a few weeks after graduation I packed my broken heart and my little short wave radio and my handheld VHF amateur transciever, my new ham radio license and my warmest clothes and went to Prague. I was scared to death. I felt like I was ging to throw up all the way there! What if I ran into Ivan in Prague? He didn't live in Prague - as far as I knew - but he had friends there, and he had finished grad school the same time as I had. What if he had taken a job in Prague? I felt like I was losing it, but for some reason I needed to get the place out of my system. I had to prove I didn't need him, and that I really loved Prague and the Czech Republic on my own terms.
Many of the people at the old Czechoslovak Radio building were wonderful. David, the editor of the English service, and Zuzka, the crazy producer who could barely speak any English... For some reson she and I totally hit it off. Bill, my American benefactor was an interesting fellow. After 11 years in Prague, he spoke no Czech and all he cared about was good jazz. I had stayed in his apartment when I first arrived becasue he was in the states for a visit and said I coud stay there for a couple weeks until I found a pace to light. His place was a hole... like apartments in those movies about crazy people who risk it all to go far away to a strange city where they don't know anyone! And the week I arrived, in early October, when the weather was just starting to get cold, the hot water was off for repairs! (Yep, they heat the water for the whole building in one place.) Bill's place was literally a blight on the face of fastidious Czech living. (Czechs are known for their small but tidy dwellings.)
When I wasn't going to and from Radio Prague, I was cleaning Bill's place, and lamenting that the fridge barely worked. I kept my milk outside on the tiny sagging balcony onto which I didn't dare step. It looked as if it might give way any second and just fall right off the side of the building!
At the Radio Prague English service I wrote a few features and news hilights which I read on the daily program. I was just thrown in and did pretty well, learning quickly how they put the daily half hour program to tape in order right there in the studio. If you made a mistake they rolled the tape back and played back until right nefore you messed up and you just started reading right from there. Scary, but kind of fun. In truth I only did a few shows for them, seeing as by the time I had arrived I had already been kind of upsaged by another intern who was a sweet lovely girl named Dita. Her father was African, her mother Czech and she had been raised in Germany, and she spoke fluent Czech! She had already been there a couple weeks, in addition to her other advantages. I never held any of it against her, but I did feel insecure about it. I dare say however that my radio voice was way better than hers! ANd my English was better too. I was amazed at how reluctant people were to ask me how to word something in English when they were doing a translation. In hindsight I should have been the proofreader!
I could go on from here and write a book about the old building and its scary version of an elevator, the cafateria (referred to in Europe as a "canteen"), and the weird linolium on all the floors and how I went back to Prague a couple years later to visit everyone and saw their nifty new studio, but this is a story about my grandpa's Readers Diget Radio!
When i was in Prague I stayed in touch with my mom and let her know what days I had recorded a show and what frequencies I would be on and what times. And, it turned out that my biggest fan was... my grandma! She would go into Grandpa's room at the right times in the evening and find the right frequency on the big goofy Reader's Digest radio, and listen to me reading news and features on Radio Prague!
A few years later when I was at their house for a visit they gave me that radio, and I still have it. It needs to be fixed, and I will fix it. Becuase when I first listened to it when I was a kid, I never would have guessed that one day my own voice would be coming out of it from one of those mysterious far away countries.
Hard to believe that not too many years later stations like Radio Prague were all but gone. Now they truly are gone, reduced to onine "broadcasts," mere shells of their former selves. And for a few weeks I had the chance to be part of what is now radio history... the Readers Digest Radio and I.
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