The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [86]
Over and over I searched the airwaves for something to listen to, but I could find nothing. It wasn’t as if I was asking for all that much. All I wanted was a station that didn’t play endless songs by bouncy prepubescent girls, didn’t employ disc jockeys who said ‘H-e-y-y-y-y’ more than once every six seconds and didn’t keep telling me how much Jesus loved me. But no such station existed. Even when I did find something half-way decent, the sound would begin to fade after ten or twelve miles, and the old Beatles song that I was listening to with quiet pleasure would gradually be replaced by a semi-demented man talking about the word of God and telling me that I had a friend in the Lord.
Many American radio stations, particularly out in the hinterland, are ridiculously small and cheap. I know this for a fact because when I was a teenager I used to help out at KCBC in Des Moines. KCBC had the contract to broadcast the Iowa Oaks professional baseball games, but it was too cheap to send its sports-caster, a nice young guy named Steve Shannon, on the road with the team. So whenever the Oaks were in Denver or Oklahoma City or wherever, Shannon and I would go out to the KCBC studio – really just a tin hut standing beside a tall transmitter tower in a farmer’s field somewhere south-east of Des Moines – and he would broadcast from there as if he were in Omaha. It was bizarre. Every couple of innings someone at the ballpark would call me on the phone and give me a bare summary of the game, which I would scribble into a scorebook and pass to Shannon, and on the basis of this he would give a two-hour broadcast.
It was a remarkable experience to sit there in a windowless hut on a steaming August night listening to the crickets outside and watching a man talking into a microphone and saying things like, ‘Well, it’s a cool evening here in Omaha, with a light breeze blowing in off the Missouri River. There’s a special guest in the crowd tonight, Governor Warren T. Legless, who I can see sitting with his pretty young wife, Bobbie Rae, in a box seat just below us here in the press-box.’ Shannon was a genius at this sort of thing. I remember one time the phone call from the ballpark didn’t come through – the guy at the other end had gotten locked in a toilet or something – and Shannon didn’t have anything to tell the listeners. So he delayed the game with a sudden downpour, having only a moment before said it was a beautiful cloudless evening, and played music while he called the ballpark and begged somebody there to let him know what was going on. Funnily enough, I later read that the exact same thing had happened to Ronald Reagan when he was a young sports-caster in Des Moines. Reagan responded by having the batter do a highly improbable thing – hit foul balls one after the other for over half an hour – while pretending that there was nothing implausible about it, which when you think about it is kind of how he ran the country as President.
Late in the afternoon, I happened on to a news broadcast by some station in Crudbucket, Ohio, or some such place. American radio news broadcasts usually last about thirty seconds. It went like this: ‘A young Crudbucket couple, Dwayne and Wanda Dreary, and their seven children, Ronnie, Lonnie, Connie, Donnie, Bonnie, Johnny and Tammy-Wynette, were killed in a fire after a light airplane crashed into their house and burst into flames. Fire Chief Walter Embers said he could not at this stage rule out arson. On Wall Street, shares had their biggest one-day fall in history, losing 508 points. And the weather outlook for greater Crudbucket: clear skies with a two per cent chance of precipitation. You’re listening to radio station K-R-U-D where you get more rock and less talk.’ There then followed Hotel California by the Eagles.
I stared at the radio, wondering whether I had heard that second item right. The biggest one-day fall in shares in history? The collapse of the American economy? I twirled the dial and found another news broadcast: ‘. . . but Senator Poontang denied