It was the summer of 1980, and my parents (in their infinite wisdom) sent me on an 18-day vacation to Port-Au-Prince, Haiti. Looking back on four decades, it was a way for my parents and brother to open up my eyes to the world.
During my stay there, I lodged at Holy Trinity Cathedral, where my brother lent his talents as a teacher in the nation’s oldest music school. But I also stayed at a home in the mountainous terrain away from town for a few days. It was, I think, an intentional act to show me how two different halves of the same country could exist within a few miles of each other.
I’ll say it here: at the suburban house, I was bored out of my mind. I couldn’t shoot baskets like I could back at home in my driveway. I found myself looking for any kind of diversion. That’s when I found a radio, and tuned into what I figured was a CBS Radio transmitter which broadcast all manner of news and informational programming around the clock.
I was familiar with some CBS Radio programming as our home could tune into the flagship station in New York. But there was a wider variety of radio programming from the network that was broadcast around the clock. There were shows called “Spectrum,” “Sidebar,” hourly news and sports, and the CBS Radio Theater, one of the last vestiges of classic radio entertainment programming.
Two months from now, that programming will cease. The owners of SkyDance, which has merged with Paramount, have unilaterally decided that 900 markets who receive radio progamming from CBS Radio will no longer receive it.
I guess, when you look at the landscape of programming, this was coming. NBC Radio closed down in 1999, the BBC stopped shortwave broadcasting in 2001, and ABC Radio was acquired by Westwood One a few years ago. Furthermore, fewer new cars these days even have radios in them; sophisticated entertainment systems are in most vehicles. And more and more people don’t listen to live radio anymore; instead, they are downloading or streaming.
And when was the last time you bought a radio?