Radio Days

Maybe b/c of George Carlin's death, I've had WBAI on my mind lately. It was my mother's favorite radio station, and she listened to it every morning.

My parents were radio people, which I'm sure was largely generational (they were children during the Great Depression). They liked having the radio on, my mother in particular, but rarely solely for music. And they were progressive, my mother in particular, and not especially long-haired in taste, though my father developed a fondness for classical music.

So I grew up listening to BAI. I had Larry Josephson's voice confused with Captain Kangaroo's; I heard him every morning as I ate my Cream of Wheat before school. Once she called up the station because she couldn't get reception and thought it had gone off the air, and Josephson made fun of her on the air, saying that some moron had called up asking what had happened to the signal, which rather put me off Josephson for a long time.

So I find myself looking up Mike Feder and seeing what he's been up to: I went to see him lo these many years ago after he'd gotten a celebratory writeup in the Times. My mother seemed to think he was poised on the brink of fame; I thought otherwise, but there was a story he told about a girl he'd been in love with in high school and college that's stayed with me over the decades; I remember hearing it the first time he told it over the air. I remember someone laughed at the wrong part when we saw him in person, and he glared at the woman and said, "Ha ha!" looking like an Old Testament prophet. I was afraid to have the wrong reaction during the rest of the show, reminded that the neurosis and unbalance aren't just an amusing shtick.