Our first family radio

I was 4 years old. It was a warm Sunday morning for a Glenwood December. In our back yard the sun was shining, the temperature was above freezing, and there was little or no snow. I don’t know why we weren’t at the Glenwood church for Sunday School–maybe there was a time when my parents didn’t attend regularly.

I was looking for my rope. It was a soft, white, clothesline type about four feet long. I liked it a lot. I carried it around and used it to pull things. Then I spotted it. It was hanging out of my dad's back pocket. And he was high up in a pine tree that was growing at the edge of our yard.

I made a complaint to my mother that Daddy had the rope that I loved. She explained that he needed it. He was trying to hang the end of a clothesline wire high in the tree, and the wire was a foot or two short. So, with the addition of my rope, he could attach the wire to the tree. The wire would serve as an antenna so we could get a radio signal. Grandpa Davenport had given my parents an old radio when he sold his home in Bingen, and my mom and dad hoped that this antenna would help with reception.

Sure enough, the wire antenna worked. When they turned the radio on, an announcer’s voice came through loud and clear. He was saying “All members of the National Guard report immediately for duty. All members of the military on leave, return to your bases. ”

This was the day, December 7, 1941, that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and we were thrust into World War II.

I remember the radio well. It was a pretty piece of furniture. It stood up on four lags with a large oak cabinet. After arising at about 4 am, milking our cows, putting a long day working in the logging for J. Niels, then again milking the cows and finishing dinner, at 9 pm every night my father would turn on Gabriel Heater reporting the news, to hear how the war was going. Both of his brothers and four brothers-in-law were serving in the military. He liked to say that the old radio ran perfectly until the month that the war was ended, in 1945. Then it quit, never to play again.

Picture: Our radio may have been of this type, which is a circa 1935 RCA Victor model C8-20, from Radiomuseum.org