I used to think that my voice went out on the 100,000 watt FM airwaves at the speed of sound and continued on into infinity. Somewhere in space my first broadcasts just now being heard, with another 20 years of signal to bombard whom or what ever scans sounds and signals trying to pinpoint my logic or lack thereof. Radio Stations home once to licence holding voices, able to log transmitter readings and bring us back up in a pinch. Live in person interviews, one take commercials, able to edit on a breath with razor and tape, no plosive P’s, no sheering S’s, voice steady, inflection and intonnation reading album liner notes like a page from a diary, promised a record the listener, (yes you!) could not live without….Then I met a wisened and saged engineer, oh keeper of transmitter and towers alike, one who holds true the virtues of tube technology. Still his tool box holds the rarest of these glass jewels among the resistors and capacitors of the vanishing golden era of radio. He told me, as I relived through him my moments in the sun, the vanishing nomadic radio disc jockey, “the signal is absorbed by the ground”, simply stated as only an engineer could so matter of factly, pull my head out of the stars and plant me on terra firma.
