I climb into my car, buckle up, back out of the parking lot. I turn right, then left, and stop at the red light. As I wait, I reach forward for my radio dial. Hitting the AM button, I scan upward, static emanating as I climb, 800, 910, 1000, 1110. Immediately, static fades, replaced by a clear tone. John Hancock, voice of WBT Newstalk 1110, beams in. As the red light changes to green, I forge homeward.
"It's 25 degrees in Charlotte tonight. Expect snow and sleet south and east of the city," the announcer says during the periodic traffic updates.
Neither the temperature nor the forecast matters. Outside my car, the night is a balmy 58 degrees. I'm a distant eavesdropper. I listen to Charlotte, N.C., radio during my 50-minute commute from the north Tampa suburbs into the city. I am Walter Mitty at 60 miles an hour.
Whether it's listening to the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. as I drove through central New Jersey or sitting in my driveway on a summer night, listening to New York Mets baseball, my car radio has always been my instrument for long-distance contact. Who needs satellite radio? Beyond four wheels and a tank of gas, my car radio transports me to places where I've been, like going home again via transmitter.
Radio has always been my favorite method of transport. As a kid, listening to BBC radio comedies like The University of Brixton. Later, the weekly Thursday night broadcasts of University Voice, when a solitary female voice read the remarkable stories of the Maroons of Jamaica, fired my boyhood imagination.
I grew up on Montserrat, a 39-square-mile island, but was raised as a citizen of the world. Daily broadcasts of BBC World News at 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. catapulted me beyond the parochial confines of a Caribbean island to the Golan Heights during the Arab-Israeli War, to civil wars in Angola and Beirut, to the armed struggle in southern Africa, to Apartheid-era South Africa and even to the White House. I didn't need to leave my house. Radio brought me the words; my imagination drew the pictures.
Long before he was a mainstay on CNN, Larry King was my voice in the night beaming from a station in Vieques, Puerto Rico. Before her giddy days as a television talk show host, Sally Jessy Raphael put me to sleep at night. I awoke many mornings only to find my batteries drained from leaving my radio on all night.
The indispensable transistor radio fed my early sports addiction. For the cost of a pair of AA batteries, I gained access to countless cricket matches - test matches between England and the West Indies. Ball-by-ball coverage, they called it. My grandfather and I sat on the veranda staring intently ahead as we listened to each pitch and each run. He always rooted for the English and so did I - until I was old enough to appreciate my folly.
Although I have never traveled to Trinidad, Jamaica or Barbados for one of those cricket matches, radio transported me to each park, directed me to a front row seat in the pavilion and gave me an unobstructed view of the proceedings.
Years later, after I left the islands for school in Washington, D.C., I made dozens of trips to New York to visit my future wife. As a fan of New York radio, I kept the station on 660 as long as I could. WFAN and Imus in the Morning.
But the real delight was sitting in a Howard University parking lot, between the School of Communication and the medical school. I would linger while I listened to WCBS Newsradio 880, with its "traffic and weather together on the eights." Music introduced the traffic chopper.
There is a symmetry to life when you hear someone talking about traffic jams hundreds of miles away: a backup heading for the Verrazano Bridge; rubber-necking on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway; a slowdown on the Cross Bronx Expressway; and a 15-minute delay at all Hudson River crossings. Later as a practicing journalist, I relied on my car radio to fill those solitary miles as I drove from one assignment to the next.
My car radio and I shared moments of quiet elation and painful disappointment. I can recall the spring, when tired of the cold New York winter, I was driving in the suburbs north of New York City when I turned on my radio and on leaped the first Mets spring training baseball game of the season. I opened my window, turned up the volume and kept going, a broad smile decorating my face.
Back then, in the first years after college, I worked every Monday night of the NCAA championship basketball game. I would leave the office just as the game entered its final five minutes. While millions watched the action on television, I relied on radio announcers to paint my pictures. When they failed, I filled in the gaps. Like the April 1989 final, Seton Hall vs. Michigan: the drive for the hoop, the charge, the ballgame. Heartbreak sat in the passenger seat as I drove home that night in my Dodge Lancer.
I was seated behind the wheel during some of the biggest political moments broadcast over the last decade. I heard news of the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on a Saturday afternoon as I drove north beneath the Bruckner Expressway in the Bronx.
My disappointment was palpable, listening to my radio in the darkness of my Ford Taurus wagon driving home on Route 18 in New Jersey late the November night as announcers confirmed Rudi Giuliani's defeat of Mayor David Dinkins and Christie Todd Whitman's surprise triumph over Democrat incumbent Gov. Jim Florio.
Radio brought me the O.J. Simpson verdict. While much of the nation crowded around television sets, I sat alone in my office, my hands wrapped around a transistor radio, listening to the bailiff pronounce Orenthal James Simpson not guilty. I didn't shout; I didn't yell. I got up and walked outside, looking in vain for someone to share the news.
In November 2000, I was in my faithful but aging Taurus, driving back from a Republican election night party in South Carolina, when the networks, which had minutes earlier called Florida for Al Gore, changed the call to George W. Bush, setting the stage for the longest night in American presidential political history.
Now I live much too far south to hear New York stations. But I do visit Chicago from time to time via WBBM. On the Loop, Atlanta is close by. I cross the Gulf of Mexico occasionally and drop into New Orleans or Birmingham, Ala., for a raging debate about the local school board or Friday night football games. I listen until the signal fades, then I scan the dial, searching for sounds of intelligent life, heading south. I don't need satellite radio. My car takes me home, but the radio transports me even farther away.
- Andrew Skerritt is an assistant editor for the St. Petersburg Times in Hernando County.
