Second-hand Second Hand Rose

[Grant Barrett]

On Saturday, March 4, 2000, Roger Shuy <shuyr at gusun.georgetown.edu> wrote:
>I remember The Baby Snooks and Daddy show too; listened to it often when I
>was a boy, sometimes with my radio under the covers so that my parents
>would think I was asleep after my bedtime. Older people (like me) have
>told me that they played the same trick on their parents. Oh, the
>wonderful days of entertainment radio! Fanny Brice, Great Gildersleeve,
>Fibber McGee and Molly, The Green Hornet, Lone Ranger, I Love a Mystery,
>and other programs were wonderful then.

I'm 29, but I have those same memories (I may have mentioned this here before). When
I was a kid in Missouri forever ago, I used to listen to AM radio at night and
because of the signal skip, I could hear WHAM 1180 from Rochester, New York. They played
old radio shows like Jack Benny and the Green Hornet and The Burns and Allen Show and
Gangbusters and Dragnet and The Shadow and The Lone Ranger and the Fred Allen Show.
And after that, I would listen to the same kinds of programs from WBBM in Chicago for
another hour.

So I have some of the same childhood memories as people two or so times my age:
crawling up under the sheets late at night desperately trying to tune the radio perfectly
so that all these strange shows could come through clearly. I miss it, though I
understand there's a station here in New York that plays them some Sunday nights.

--
Grant Barrett
gbarrett at americandialect.org