1954 Sparton Football

I have a lot of radios.

When visitors come to my house in Florida, they can't help but be overwhelmed by the display of radios. The most common comment is - well, the most common comment is, "you really need to find yourself a woman," - but after that, it is, "do they all work?"

It is a bit of a tricky question because, although the great majority do work, they don't get very good, or actually any, reception where I live. So, I end up giving Bill Clinton-like answers – ‘it depends on your definition of works'.

I would turn the radio on, wait 30 seconds for the tubes to heat up, then turn the dial around and get various degrees of static. On occasion, you could detect a hint of voices and a soupçon of what might have been Caribbean music. My friend Allie, the kind soul that she is, said she thought she could hear a few notes of Steely Dan. But mostly just static. After a while, when asked if they worked, I would just say no and leave it at that. Until my ex-girlfriend came to town.

Now, this ex-girlfriend, like all of my ex-girlfriends, was happily married. Everything and everyone begins to look great after a few months with me. I actually quite liked her husband and thought nothing of suggesting they drop by if they found themselves in my 'hood. I guess you could say I'm doing better now than I was when we were together, but I'm not sure how far away being alone with a house full of radios is from being alone with a house full of cats, and I'm not really sure anyone is keeping score.

Although, I think she was.

So, when she said, "oh, what a beautiful pool," it was hard for me not to hear that she was really saying was, 'I hope you drown in it.'

This is only to say that she derived a great amount of joy upon discovering that the radios did not actually work.

For about 45 minutes, I think 'static' was her all-time favorite word. Not only that, she was visually ecstatic every time she heard static coming out of a radio. At one point, she gleefully said, "listen, static in stereo."

I don't know what it is about ex-girlfriends.

I have no regrets.

I have no second thoughts.

But, be that as it may, the very next day, I decided to make the damn radios work.

I began with antennas. My house was soon filled with coiled wires and antennas of every shape and form. Still static. The first glimmer of hope came when one of my radio dealers, one who ironically really only cared about the mint appearance of the radios, told me there was a vintage radio store, in Alberta, Canada no less, which advertised a homemade mini radio transmitter. This was a metal box, about a third of the size of a tissue box, which you could connect to your iPhone. If you placed the transmitter directly behind a radio, it would then transmit the music to a megahertz band, in this case, it was 1150, on your AM tube radio. Unlike with Bluetooth, you would actually have to tune into a station, literally your own radio station - with a range of only three feet - and the music would play through the radio as it did seventy years ago. Best of all, it was only $79.

"Do you think it will work?" I asked.

"Doesn't hurt to try," she said.

So, I ordered one, peppered the owner with tons of questions, and waited patiently for my transmitter to arrive.

When it did, I was like a kid on Christmas morning. Not a Jewish kid. But you get what I mean.

I called Fernando, my handyman, and his assistant José. Now, the woman I bought the transmitter from told me that setting it up would be child's play. But she had no idea who she was dealing with. I'm not as smart as a child. And twice as lazy. This thing had wires and a metal enclosure which required the use of a screwdriver. I did not own a screwdriver. José and Fernando tried for four hours, including a one-hour conversation with the woman in Alberta, but could not elicit a single peep from any of the five radios we tried. It turned out, they all agreed, that there was just too much interference in the area for it to work. Which is why we couldn't tune in to any regular station. She was going to send a replacement transmitter just in case the first got damaged in delivery, but none of us were holding our breath. All of these radios. And not a single song. I was crestfallen.

Listen, I'm not an idiot. First world problems and all. But still, it really sucked. José felt so bad that he gifted me his screwdriver. At 3 am, I got up to pee. Also, at 1 am, and 2 am. But, that's not part of the story. I walked to the dining room, where we had left the transmitter, and turned on the light. The transmitter had come with instructions, and now I read them for the first time. Remove the back and insert a 9-volt battery. I used José's screwdriver and unscrewed the four screws and removed the back. It already had a battery. I flicked the On/Off button a few times but no dice. Then, I removed the battery and put it back in, making sure it was tight and secure. Still no dice. Then, because I'm nothing if not a quitter, I put the back cover back on, deftly screwed in the four screws, and went back to bed.

At 4 am, I got up to pee.

Which, as you may have figured out, was not unusual. But, I also had an idea. Which was very unusual.

I went to my radio display. I grabbed a working transistor radio. I then removed the back from that transistor, unclasped the 9-volt battery, went to the dining room, turned on the light, unscrewed the four screws with José's screwdriver, removed the back, replaced the battery in the transmitter with the one I had removed from the transistor, and then tried the On/Off switch.

And a light came on.

And god said that was good.

I then grabbed the same Sparton which Allie said she could maybe hear Steely Dan from, plugged it in, waited thirty seconds, tuned the dial to 1150, attached the transmitter to my iPhone, placed the transmitter directly behind the Sparton, found the song I wanted on YouTube, and then hit play. And music came from the speakers of the 1954 Sparton Football. It wasn't crisp. It wasn't clear. It crackled a little. But it was music. Coming from the radio.

And god said it was good.

I then played the song again and, using a second phone mind you, took a twenty-second video of the radio playing. I then texted the video to Fernando and José and Allie. I was so excited I didn't know if I would fall asleep. I had half a mind to stay up and make videos of music playing on my radios all night. But I went to bed and I fell asleep. In the morning, Allie sent me a text.

'What am I looking at?'

'My radio playing music.'

'Through the transmitter?'

'Yup.'

'Nice. Are you going to send it to,' and then she mentioned the name of my ex-girlfriend.

And I said, ‘of course not. This has nothing to do with her.’

And Allie said, ‘Of course not.’

But, it just so happened that the aforementioned ex-girlfriend was in town for a convention, and I prevailed on her to come over to check out the radios in action. And so, she did. And I did my little transmitter song and dance. And by some strange coincidence, I may have picked out songs that some people may have remembered as ‘our songs.’ I mean, I don't really remember. After I was all done with the presentation, she said, "let me get this straight. Every time you want to play a radio, you gotta drag this little box around, and it won't play unless it's sitting right behind the radio?"

So, what could I say? I had to say, “yes.”

Then she said, “okay.”

But it was the way she said it.

If you now think the very first thing I did the minute she walked out of the house was to order a $2,200 transmitter from a company in Norway, which promised it could get reception for any and every radio I owned from any and every room in my house, well, you would have been 100% right. That is exactly what I did. I had to wait six months. Not for the transmitter. The transmitter came right away, but it was six months before the ex-girlfriend came back. But I waited. This time she brought her sister. It was, as best as I could tell, a shared schadenfreude. The exhibition could not have gone better. Jazz and blues from every room in the house, plus from a transistor all the way on the actual 17th green. The Norwegian transmitter worked like a charm. Not even a hint of static. It was a coup de force.

"Wow," said my ex-girlfriend, "it's like you have your own radio station."

Now she got it; she really got it.

"So, what do you think?" I asked.

And I didn't see it coming.

Because she smiled and then said, "I think you really need to get yourself a woman."

The End