Shortwave
A 1960s escape into the unbounded ether
When at age twelve my family moved from coastal Massachusetts to central Connecticut I had an overwhelming feeling of displacement. Everything seemed so different from what I knew. People there spoke differently; rather, I spoke differently, my Massachusetts accent often causing amusement. Other children would ask me to repeat a sentence that had words like “car” or “corn” in them, then roar with laughter when I said “cah” or “cawn.” I was not happy and I took to dreaming about being elsewhere, though I could not have articulated where—just not there.
I don’t recall now what sparked my interest in shortwave radio, but once I became aware of it I think it offered some form of escape from the isolated place we now lived—a large old farmhouse on the rural edge of town. I was able to claim a small third-floor room, probably once a bedroom for a domestic servant, where I set up a cheap shortwave radio, an Archer “Globe Control” built from a kit, and listened to voices from distant places. I would select the desired broadcast band and turn the tuning dials until I heard the pattern of a test signal. This was usually some short, repeated semi-musical pattern that was unique to the broadcaster. Once these patterns became familiar, it was easy to identity the station.
Almost everything I listened to was from a state broadcaster, whose programmes generally lasted 30 minutes. The first station I encountered was probably the BBC World Service, which captured attention by its strong signal and the studied intonation of its presenters. Its content was typical of shortwave stations, a mix of the news that official Britain wanted to share with Commonwealth members and the world at large, along with topical reports on cultural issues.
There was, however, something already familiar about the BBC, and I found it less intriguing than the harder-to-tune-in stations from countries less well known to me. Radio Sofia Bulgaria, for example. I had never given that part of the world much thought and it was only through these broadcasts that I even knew a place called “Sofia” existed. It seemed far away and exotic, and it being a “communist regime” made listening to it seem like partaking of forbidden fruit.
The list of countries I was tuning in was ever expanding. From western Europe I routinely heard broadcasts from Deutsche Welle, the German state broadcaster; the Vatican had a reliable signal—and still does—and even had limited programming in Latin; and there was Radio Netherlands Worldwide, broadcasting from Hilversum. There seemed to be far more shortwave stations from eastern Europe, and from communist countries in general, than from elsewhere. Radio Moscow was dominant among them, but there were easily found broadcasts from Romania, Radio Praha in Czechoslovakia, Radio Tirana Albania, and of course Radio Habana Cuba. Then there were the more elusive broadcasts from South America and Africa, among which were Radio Quito Ecuador and Radio Ghana. All these places seemed so far away. I wanted to know more about them.
I soon learned that if one wrote down details of the broadcast—date and time, topics presented—one could send this report to the broadcaster and receive a colourful postcard that verified your report. These are called QSL cards, and avid shortwave radio enthusiasts of the time collected as many as possible and decorated their “radio shacks” with them. I began to do the same. I also found a map of the world among the many maps that my grandfather had saved from old National Geographic magazines and attached it to the wall of my radio room and placed colourful map pins on the places from which I’d received a broadcast.
Once they had your home address, those state broadcasters did not stop with sending their collectible QSL card—they were now able to send all manner of propagandistic literature. I was soon receiving such documents weekly. I received glossy pamphlets from South Africa that represented an exclusively favourable Afrikaner perspective on Apartheid. Radio Moscow would send a monthly magazine that had stories about the glories of the Soviet Union, especially its agricultural and industrial accomplishments. Broadcasters from other communist countries sent things, too, sometimes decorated with what would have been seen as provocative iconography, such as a big red star or a hammer and sickle. We had moved following the presidency of John F. Kennedy, so my awareness of Cuba was perhaps greater than of other communist country. I looked forward to the news and propaganda they provided, since it was so different from anything else I thought I knew about Cuba. (My father, a quartermaster in the U.S. Navy, had been stationed in Havana in 1942 and loved it there, so I suppose that made me sympathetic from the start.)
These were the days when fascination with spies and espionage became widespread. The first James Bond film with Sean Connery was released in 1962 and inspired many lesser TV imitators—”The Man from U.N.C.L.E.,” “I Spy,” “Mission Impossible,” “The Avengers,” and the satirical “Get Smart.” Russian spies infiltrated children’s programming, as Boris and Natasha appeared in the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons; and even the children’s marionette programme Supercar featured the stereotypical Russian “Spymaster” and his companion “Zarin.”
Such entertainments aside, there was still genuine concern in the post-McCarthy era about “communist influence” in the United States, and the regular receipt of mail from “behind the Iron Curtain” was a matter of great concern to my parents. They warned me that I, and perhaps they, would become the subject of “an FBI file” if I continued corresponding with these nefarious foreign powers and receiving their propagandistic publications. I’ve never investigated to find out if they were right.
My interest in shortwave radio was relatively short-lived. My basic regenerative radio receiver was fussy and limited in its selectivity, and eventually it failed altogether. I had also moved on to other ways of learning about the world far from home through reading fiction and especially, in college, through history. I developed an insatiable Wanderlust and dreamed of travelling and experiencing these far-away and fascinating places first-hand.
It would be a long time before international travel became a reality for me, however, but adventures did indeed lie ahead. In retrospect, shortwave radio represented my first step down that path.