[RTS] If Radios Could Talk...

[jon_chaisson]

The Old Reliable, the Weatherbeaten, the one and only 'Jonzbox'.

I'm pretty sure this was acquired around 1984--I know I had it at least at that point, as I'd started making radio tapes (that is, mixtapes of stuff taped off the radio) around that time. This wasn't the radio that helped me discover college radio (that was a Walkman I'd gotten for Christmas later that year), but it was the radio used when I started taping things from college radio. It was the radio that taped many end-of-year countdowns. It recorded silly sounds made by friends and family. It recorded nearly the entire Flying Bohemians catalog from 1988 onwards. It recorded nearly all the jeb! jams as well. It played tapes in the side yard while we played volleyball or badminton, or washed the car in the summer, or shoveled the driveway in the winter. It had its original three-foot antenna, graduated to a Radio Shack-bought six-footer that made all the stations come in beautifully, and gone back to another three-footer. If you notice, there's a bit of Scotch tape near 88.1 on the radio dial--at one point I'd taped a strip of paper, where I'd marked where all the good stations were, and the ones I listened to most. WAMH, WMUA, WMDK, WAQY, WRSI, WAAF, and so on. Its spot had started at my desk, and graduated to the top of my bookcase (where my books had been moved, replaced by my burgeoning cassette collection) until I moved out to college. I graduated to a few other boomboxes later on, but this one remained with me for the longest time, until I moved west. It finally came out with me to stay late last year.

It's now in Spare Oom, not currently plugged in but ready to fulfill its duty whenever I wish it. It's still in working condition, even if the cassette door hinge no longer springs open (I have to lean it forward and let gravity do its thing), and the left speaker is iffy. When I used it last, about six years ago, it still played tapes and recorded pretty damn decent lo-fi sound with surprisingly little hiss. I've never had another boombox like it, or one that worked as awesomely as this one.