1974

I spent the winter of 1974 in a small, unheated cabin near Hickory, NC. To get to the cabin, I would take one of the east-west roads in Hickory, like 1st or 2nd Avenue, and drive to US 321 and then head north. Not far up 321 there was a dirt road on the right and I'd turn into that. (No doubt the road is paved now.) I'd enter a forest (now a subdivision) and drive until I came to a small cabin. It was a summer cottage and therefore it was unheated. At night (winter, remember), the room would get cold enough to freeze water left in a glass. I slept on a sofa under an electric blanket on the highest heat setting, with several "regular" blankets on top of the electric blanket. There was a sheet metal shower stall in the bathroom, but in the morning the water faucets could not be turned because they were frozen. 

I had no TV but I had a radio. At night I listened to the Larry Glick radio show that was broadcast on clear-channel WBZ 1030 in Boston. That show was a hoot. Glick would call people on his studio phone and talk to them, not telling them their conversation was being transmitted over the air as they spoke. One night he called an airplane pilot who had recently been in the news for being involved in some kind of aircraft mishap. Larry got the pilot to talk about the accident in a fair amount of detail. At the end of the conversation, the pilot asked Larry to not reveal to anyone what he had said. Larry agreed not to tell anyone about their conversation. But, of course, the entire conversation had gone out over WBZ's powerful clear-channel radio waves that probably reached all the way to Mexico.

A popular movie at the time was American Graffiti. The film was set in 1962, on the last day of summer vacation for friends Curt (Richard Dreyfuss), Steve (Ronny Howard), Terry (Charles Martin Smith) and John (Paul Le Mat). They cruised the streets of a small California town, while a mysterious disc jockey (Wolfman Jack) spun classic rock'n'roll tunes that were broadcast over 150,000 watt radio station XERB. That station today is called XEPRS-AM. (For radio aficionados, XEPRS is a Class A, 50,000-watt clear-channel station using a non-directional antenna in the daytime and a three-tower array directional antenna at night. It is licensed to Playas de Rosarito, a suburb of Tijuana in Baja California, Mexico. You can listen here.)

The year 1974 was also the year that a friend and I bought a Chevy camper van and traveled all over America with our three dogs and often with one or more hitchhikers. Fun times!