Check out this charming article about rediscovering radio by Anthony M. Castelletti in The Buffalo News:
“As a child in the 1960s, I enjoyed listening to distant radio stations, I suppose initially for no reason other than because they came from far away. It was a young boy’s hobby based on the accidental discovery of 1050 CHUM in Toronto. Remember, this was quite a feat for a one-transistor, pocket AM radio without an antenna that was the product of 1950s technology. I soon discovered that if I took that little radio outside, even more distant stations were right there on that dial.
Along with my beloved hometown Buffalo Bisons, I also became a fan of the Fort Wayne Komets hockey team, not due to any connection to Indiana, but rather due to my ability to listen to their games on WOWO-AM. This was soon followed by CKLW from Windsor, Ont., a rock ’n’ roll station as powerful as my hometown favorite KB 1520.
It took a couple of years of playing with that little radio for me to figure out that if I snuck outside and listened to the in-dash radio in my father’s Chevy, without starting the car and giving myself away of course, broadcasts from faraway places like New York City, Chicago and on rare occasions Florida, Georgia, Tennessee and other places I had never visited, were right there at my finger tips.
It also didn’t take long for my father to find out why the battery in his car had suddenly died. This was followed by a calmly delivered, yet lengthy and technically detailed lecture from my father, an electrician, on the effects of using a car battery without doing anything to charge said battery.”