My father may be gone, but ‘our’ radio is still going #Radio @latimes
Robert McGee writes in the LA Times:
My most prized possession was once somebody’s trash.
It’s a blocky, black radio that was manufactured in 1941, the year my father was 12 years old. I snatched it from the county landfill when I was 13, in 1978.
The person who threw it away must have determined they couldn’t fix it, though it seemed they thought someone else might.
They had set the radio off to the side of the dumpster, safe in plain view, just in case some industrious person with know-how appeared.
That person was my father, who ran an electronics repair business from our garage. Though at first reluctant to save “that ugly old thing,” he seemed pleased hours later when he entered the kitchen announcing that the radio worked fine and had only needed a tube. For years after this, my father kept that radio on a shelf above his workbench, listening to country singers croon about lonesome truckers.
I’ve become somewhat protective, even superstitious, when it comes to our radio, which now resides on a shelf above the space where I work. These days I use it sparingly; I realize that each time it flickers to life could be its last.
Each time I listen to our radio, I see my father just as he was that day when we found it.
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