CB Nights

I’m seventeen in 1980; it’s too late at night for me to be up - it’s a school night - and my grades would suggest more sleep would help. I’m lying on the couch in my “playroom” - our finished basement. It had a long sectional sofa, my stereo, a small TV, and a poster or two. It was my room, a “man cave,” as it would be called now. The soft lights of my Realistic receiver and turntable add a bit of soft yellow light to the darkened room as the Lava Light created its endless rising and falling red blobs, and Journey’s Evolution played the soundtrack of my teen life, the pains and thrills of young love, at a soft volume. Radio Shack, thank God, was in my town, so at least I could buy decent sound equipment - and other fun electronics. I watch as the needles of the VU meters jump back and forth as if the batons of a maestro. I’m falling into a daze when -

“Break 1-1, how ‘bout cha Chevy Van, you copy?” A familiar female voice shatters the quiet of the moment, breaking through the squelch curtain of my too-loud 40-channel Realistic Navajo, jarring me from the lull of Steve Perry crooning “Lovin’, Touchin’, Squeezin’.” It’s Mighty Pup, my Canadian girlfriend (my hometown, Ogdensburg, is located on the St. Lawrence River, 2 miles from the Canadian border). We’d meet every night about this time.

“Copy Mighty Pup, go to 23”

I had met Christine - and several other Canadian girls - on the CB. We would discuss school, parents, siblings, other couples, and, of course, us, and when we would get together again. Being a boy, I had one thing predominant on my mind, and it wasn’t school, but it was indeed a subject I wanted to study. Hopping on the phone wasn’t an option because, back then, long-distance rates were confiscatory. A $300 bill one month showed me that—as well as a yardstick coming down from on high at high speed from my mother.

CB radio, the social media device of our time - was a cheap way of communicating, but it was essentially a party line where anyone could listen in to your conversations. So you learned to have your own language with your love interest to keep the Gladys Kravitz’s of the airwaves guessing. “Squirrely” meant wanting to make out; “Sneakers” would mean sneaking in a window at night, and “Two scoops” meant….well, referring to a lady’s undergarment. I think Navajo Code Talkers would have had trouble keeping up with some of us more motivated teens.

Oh, we’d use the police codes of “10-7”, “10-10 on the side”, “10-20”, and the omnipresent “10-4”. I understand why police and truckers would use this shorthand for messages - so as not to miss other’s important transmissions - but why the heck were we doing it on a band where you could talk freely? To sound “cool” or informed, I guess. We said “ten” more than drunken college boys at a beach wet t-shirt contest.

Of course, you had to have a license with the FCC, and they would give you call letters, your radio “license plate” which cost about $8, as I recall, for about five years. This was needed if you had a CB that transmitted over 300 milliwatts, about all the electricity you’d find in a static shock.

After an hour or two of talking, we’d “sign-off” for the night, only to wake up too early the following day to walk bleary-eyed to school. Sometimes, if I wasn’t ready to go to bed, I’d listen in on other’s conversations, which could get quite risque.

CB “rigs” as they were called, came in a few different form factors - one was a handheld walkie-talkie type, with anywhere from one to three to twenty-three channels - forty later on - and had a telescopic antenna, which on many a Christmas morning, broke before supper time. You could get a power supply for most of them, so you could plug it into a wall outlet instead of going through batteries like beer at a college party. Mobile CBs - the type you’d mount in a car - could also be rigged up to be used at home with a power converter; add an external antenna, and you’d be ready to go. Then, there were base stations, a much grander radio, often with wooden enclosures, and more buttons and gauges to play with. We more techy types would obsess over SWR meters, Delta Tune knobs, modulation lights, and whatever other tech manufacturers would throw at us.

You don’t hear much about CBs now, another soldier that fell on the battlefield of technology, but it could be argued that CB radios were the precursor to today’s social media in that information—such as where “bears” were hiding on the highway—could be shared very quickly if only for a short distance. Alas, they seem to have largely retreated back to where they originally started out - with truckers.

Of course, you’d have people misbehaving on the CB, just like any medium. Guys would put “boots” on their radios - power supplies that would boost the output wattage of the CB - to extend their talking range - or to get on a power trip and absolutely crush everyone else on the same channel with their transmission once they keyed the mike. They would even “crossover” to the next channel, as the signal was so powerful. Sometimes, a nearby neighbor’s TV signal would get compromised by the high-wattage radio signal so much that it turned the victim’s TV set into a veritable oscilloscope, and a neighborhood war would ensue. If you really hated a neighbor or wanted to command the local transmitting area, then a “beam” antenna - which focused the transmission signal into a relatively narrow horizontal column - could be mounted high on a pole and, using a TV antenna rotor, could be aimed in any direction, a radio death ray of sorts worthy of War of the Worlds. God bless the poor bird that might pass in its sights just at the moment of transmission - I think it would have either had its DNA reconfigured instantly or fallen to the ground aflame.

Others would try to scare these power-mad guys by suggesting on the air that they heard the FCC was in town, looking for violators. I didn’t see where that worked much; at best, it kept the perp off a day or two.

Sometimes, we’d hit “Skipland,” a phenomenon where you could pull in CB users from very far away due to atmospheric conditions, and if circumstances were right, they could talk back, if only for a few moments. At night, I recall hearing the French-Canadian truckers talking, with their diesel motors droning in the background and their deep voices just dripping of French, a veritable au jus of the audio world.

No, CB radio wasn’t a perfect way to communicate; you couldn’t transmit that far, other people could listen in, you never knew if the other party was on (there was no way to “signal” them to get on). Still, because of all those things - well, maybe that’s what made it cool, interesting…special.

And Chris? We didn’t last that long. She went on to have a baby with a Canadian guy and then did some “exotic” dancing.

So I guess I’ll go 10-10 for a short, and catch you on the flip side…for now.