Radio Shack, and the Electronics That Shaped My Childhood

Today’s electronics would have stupefied me as a teenager, had someone gone back in time and shown me what a cell phone was, how complex online games were, or how advanced cameras were, it would have been like finding the Ark of the Covenant , or some other profound religious experience.

I was in to tech as virtually all boys were. I visited the Radio Shack store at the Seaway Shopping Center so often, I had my own break room in the back. I would pour over their catalog at home, the geeky equivalent of Playboy, with the stereo systems rated “Good”, “Better” or “Best”, noting the differences and the agonizing decisions the grader had to make, along the lines of an art work collector. Visiting the store meant basking in the glowing displays of the receivers, the bouncing VU meters, the endless buttons to push - it was a virtual red light district for us technophiles. To add to the excitement, like Disney adding a new park, there was CB radios that were breaking into the newly expanded 40-channel range, police scanners, portable cassette decks - all amounted to endless technical joy.

Guys sometimes used the size of their audio system to boost their rankings among the other guys, the equivalent, I suppose to how monkey packs find their alpha males. Power, size, wattage, cool lights, Wow and Flutter - all were figured into the final tally of your score. If you got into the digital side of receivers, where you could literally dial in a station number, like WSLB’s 1400…well, you were in new territory; one that was yet to be explored, understood and graded. You were safe in the analog world, where you had to tune in to the station, going a little left, then a little right, until  you found the best signal, a goldilocks approach to airwaves, but this digital stuff was just an unknown.

CB radios were all the rage back then; it was our social media. Everyone could listen in to your conversation that was in radio range, which at the time was just maybe 10 miles. People had their “handles” - radio names - and mine was Chevy Van, coming from that one-hit Sammy John’s song of the same name. There was certain norms you didn’t violate on the CB airwaves, or you’d be ostracized from the community like a Mormon caught at a brothel.  You had to “break” into a channel, meaning you said “Break 1 - 1” if you wanted to talk on that channel, channel 11. Someone would have to say “Go ahead” or some other like affirmation for you to continue. People would get testy if you didn’t give the go ahead sometimes, breaking social norms by talking anyway. Channel 11 was basically the meeting room of the community, and people would pair off and go to other channels to talk. It was a party line, essentially, anyone could listen it. Couples would invent codes to skip to different channels quickly before any listen-loos would catch on to the gist of the conversation. Then there was the guys that had “their boots on”, which was just having their radio power jacked up so high they could compromise satellites. They’d press their mic buttons and just destroy anyone else’s transmissions, while talking to other continents, if they wanted. Threats were made to report them to the FCC by frequency deputies of the time, or would say things like “I heard the FCC is town looking for boots.”

Car stereo systems. If you had the basics, you had an AM/FM radio. You might have a CB radio - our first way of talking from a car, decades before the cell phone. Guys liked to put in more advanced systems, sometimes hacking out their dashboards to shoe-horn one in, or mounting it under the dash in what would become a constant knee mangler, rivaling that of medieval torture devices. Cassette tapes were the current status quo then; 8 track tapes were old school, cassettes, much cooler. Finding a song on the cassette deck required an acute sense of timing and hearing; rarely did you just forward or rewind the tape and get to the beginning of a song. Occasionally, the tape and playing mechanism would have a fight, and if you caught it quickly enough, the damage could be limited, much like a cut to the jugular vein; but if not, you were taxed with trying to carefully pull out a couple of feet of little brown tape, being careful not to stretch it or break it. IF you could do that, you might be able to rewind it manually with a pencil, which fit perfectly into the sprockets of the cassette. At that point, brain surgery might be your calling in life, so delicate a procedure this was.

Thank God we didn’t have any camera to instantly transmit our foolishness to the world in a click.