Great if you like them–and I do
June 30, 2011 (Thursday)
My car radio days go back many years. I remember when air conditioning was totally unknown, and car heaters were add-ons that you could buy at Western Auto and install yourself if you were mechanically-minded. And the car radio? Forget about it. It was a very rare specialty prized by only a fortunate few, and those that existed were A.M. only, because there was no F.M., at least not to my knowledge. Now what I’ve just described was the way it was a very long time ago.
As time went on, most people had an A.M. radio of some kind in their cars. In the evening hours, several stations were allowed to power up and could be heard all over the country, I guess. One of those was the voice of Del Rio, Texas. They had a lot of religious broadcasting. One evening I heard the singing of the Chuck Wagon Gang, followed by a pitch to buy their old records by writing to the friendly folks in Del Rio. Well, that was my dream, believe it or not. I wanted those old records, and I bought them.
I delighted in playing them, but after a while, as was the case with all old vinyls, I began to hear the sound made after the needle made tiny scratches on the surface. Fortunately for me, the cassette tape was now a reality, so I transferred the ten songs to the tape, where they have remained all these years. But now the tape is getting old, and is likely to fail at any time, so this week I transferred the music to the computer and any day now I will transfer it again, this time to my mp3 player, where, hopefully, it will endure after I’m gone. Of course, it won’t have to do that because nobody in my family will want to hear them. I will enjoy them, however. Very much.
Several years ago, Calvary Baptist Church of Rockport had a young pastor whose wife was the grand daughter of one of the ladies in the Chuck Wagon Gang. He told me that the grandmother, whom he believed to be “Rose,” lived in Azle, where Wanda and I had lived years ago. To think I had lived near her without knowing it was a surprise. She and her family (the Carter family) had been my heroes since my childhood.