In the summer of 1985, I was 13 years old, and my world was an inferno. I lived in an old civil war plantation mansion on the edge of a tiny town in the southeastern U.S. It was a mining and farming community, and at the very center of the town was a very strict Baptist college that had a stronghold on the politics and operations of everything in the community. The mansion wasn't grand or decadent in any way like one would think. It had been built by the same man that founded the college, and was absolutely utilitarian in purpose with no pretty moldings to crown the rooms. None of the several stairs terminated in decorative curves with the pretty handrails that were popular in the times the home was built - they were narrow and dark and plain. The mantels of the fireplaces were deathly boring. And this sort of theme extended far beyond the original owner and builder. More than a century later, when the house was wired for electricity, great pains were taken to ensure that the ugliest and least brilliant chandeliers were hung in every great room.
My parents bought the old plantation and its most interior acreage at an auction. It was a cold, abandoned, unlivable home, surrounded by a number of barns and outbuildings, but I remember how cool it was that people only had to put the mansion's name, instead of the address, to get mail to us. We weren't a wealthy family, but we weren't quite dirt poor either. My father worked at the mines that operated on what used to be the land of the plantation, and the company took care of him, but my youth immediately descended into a slavery when we moved there. Instead of cartoons on Saturday mornings, I had poison ivy vines to hack away from every barn and building...to burn in large piles. Instead of play, I had painful, oozing rashes, ditches to dig, and helping hands to hold flashlights and pull wires under the house - with all these dried up bodies of cats and squirrels, bones protruding through petrified skin and ghastly faces. There was every manner of work to be done, and when there was a lull, there was hay throwing and tobacco field work for neighbors and relatives. My father was happy to farm me out. It would be wrong to think that I didn't make time for adventures though. I had a lot more energy than him.
By 1985, we had the place pretty well established. That summer I had shortwave radios and parts scattered across my bedroom floor. I was taking them apart. I took everything apart then. We lived on the edge of town, but I wasn't allowed to go play with the other children. My father was sure someone would be a bad influence on me...that I would get into trouble...and instead, I had his permission to trespass on the mine property and it's 100's of acres. "Don't get caught!"
At the other end of that property was an old, very private Jewish couple that had escaped the Holocaust. I never understood why they moved there, because the people of that community were as dull, as loud and passionate, and as homogeneous as people can get. They had their narrow "right," and their very broad "wrong," and they killed things they didn't understand. It was a very racist community. It was a very illiterate community. I didn't understand anything.
The old Jewish man died, quite without ceremony, and shortly after that, the kind, secretive widow gave me all of his radios. Of course, this was before "the internet" was established at all, and shortwave radios were how you reached out to communicate with the world back then.
Every one of those radios was broken.
Summer nights were unbearable, sweaty nights, and there was no sleep to be had. My blood was just as hot with hormones, and my mind raged, seemingly all directions without a point. There were four distant radio stations that didn't play country music or gospel. One played classical music. One played the likes of Paul McCartney - post Beetles. There was one station called, "The Rock," that played approximately 50 Classic Rock songs, and sadly, it still remains...playing the same songs. Literally. And there was one new radio station playing pop music that sometimes would come through my gray "boombox," a Maxell cassette queued, music coming through headphones while my parents slept so delicately and angrily below me. The play button went down mechanically when you pressed, oh so heavily, on the record button, and if you pushed it with your thumb, you wouldn't break your finger at the joint - and it also allowed you to spread your fingers and hit the pause button at the same time. It took a special talent to record your favorite songs without getting some egomaniac DJ's voice talking about himself over some of your favorite riffs and lyrics.
This was a minute in my life, within the minutes that I grew, sitting on that old wood floor with a soldering iron, in the last hours before the radio stations went off air. When there was such a term. I melted the solder on the ancient circuits, removed them, and inventoried them to check with meters later, so that I could build a working shortwave radio. I worked and listened to the boombox through the big headphones, mindful of moving silently, with utter care or I would be beaten. It took a lot of tries to get a full recording of this song without that DJ desperately polluting it.
That old, historic mansion was destroyed about ten years ago so that the city could build a giant, over-sized new complex of fire station and police headquarters. The city planners didn't want the old home sitting next to it, so it was torn down and only grass grows there now. And that doesn't bother me at all.
