The radio, as a trusty companion, changes like the rest of life. As a child I was glued to the RCA radio for The Shadow (“the weed of crime bears bitter fruit”) and the Green Hornet, Inner Sanctum, The Lone Ranger and Dennis the Menace. As a teenager, my car radio was as important to me as Tonto or Silver were to The Lone Ranger (Clayton Moore), the daring and resourceful masked rider of the plains. My adolescent peers and I listened to black r&b stations to be informed when Antoine “Fats” Domino, Chuck Berry, Etta James and the Clovers came to the old Houston Coliseum. My dad and I used to listen in his woodshop to the “Old Scotchman” Gordon McClendon when he recreated (he read the timely tickertape and used sound effects to simulate game sounds with his narration as if he were there at the game) baseball for the Houston Buffaloes (farm team for St Louis Cardinals). Later it was the illiterate but hilarious former St Louis Cardinal pitcher Dizzy Dean who was the commentator (“he done slud into home”). He was to red necks what Algonquin C. Calhoun was to Amos n’ Andy. Summer 1955: I was in a canoe in the wilds of Canada. My transistor radio was able to pick up Alan Freed from the Moondog Palace in Chicago (The Platters-“Only You”;The Penguins-“Earth Angel”). In college, I developed an interest in cultural anthropology. In the hills of Austin, the average Texas radio received the powerful broadcasts from across the Texas border in Mexico. It was a cultural reminder of the claptrap poor uneducated rural Texans (aka “basura alba”) heard as gospel, believed militantly, and fell for with their hard earned cash -“love gifts” for “prayer claws” (to apply on goiters and tumors and then wait for the miracle) or a piece of the Jesus’s “hem of the garment” from every slick talking snake oil salesman in a white suit with the money for the microphone. Nowadays hucksters are mainstream. They want tax breaks and respect in exchange for acting as Judas Goats for the religious right.

The radio is a cultural monitoring. These days I find a smorgasbord of music, Pacifica, National Public Radio, sports chat and the prison show. The prison show (Friday night-KPFT) is amazing. Loved ones of Texas inmates call in. The mama calls Ray Hill at the radio station. Ray puts her on the air like Radio Free Europe. Son listens from the prison cell (from a joint to the joint). It is America singing. (Example: “Hi Ray. How you doin? This is for Dwayne over in the Darrington unit. Hi, honey. Didn’t come see you last weekend. Paw Paw had the flu. Say hello to Cheetah and Little Joe (fellow prisoners). See you next weekend. Here’s Junior. He wants to say something. Mumble. Bye.”) Some is touching. Some is sad. All is real. The family of man. And Ray Hill is a saint of a man for what he does for the locked away and dispossessed of our society. I used to tune in to some country music artists like Willie Nelson and the Dixie Chicks until Clear Channel owned the world and began to be so doggedly right wing [especially when they called the Dixie Chicks “seditious _____s” (derogatory term for prostitutes)]. Clear Channel has to die out for taking Texas out of Texans. Sounds like preppy Poppa Poppy Bush putting the shuck on us by pretending to eat chitlins’ or full shuck tamales.

Every other sporty cretin that calls in to some self appointed know it all radio sports show host (1) refers to the owner of the Astros as “Drayton” (as if they went to grade school together) (2) unloads his loopy logic and (3) assumes everyone, especially Drayton McLaine, cares one whit. (Example of a classic: “I think I speak for the whole Aggie Nation when I say we get no respect…”). Who are these people? At malls-they have to be the goofy ones in baggy pants and the sidesaddle ballcaps. Who sent for them? Oh, how I wish they would focus their relentless second guessing, Doubting Thomas, “emperor has no clothes” attention on the absence of a posse for the perpetrators of 9/11 and on the politicians that tell us that two wars, two tax cuts and Eighty Seven Billion Dollars later, we middle Americans are safer and better off than we were 4 years ago. See you on the radio.