The Radio

We had an old radio that was almost the size of a dresser. My parents had had it for a long time and were very attached to it. They thought so much of it that I assumed the pioneers carried it across the plains with them. A door on the top of the radio could be slid back to reveal some knobs and a glass plate over the channel indicator. We always left the door slid back, leaving the controls exposed. One day when we were living in Solon, Alice Marie stepped on the radio and broke it.

How did Alice manage to step on the radio? Well, I used to try to get around the house without stepping on the floor. It was a little game for me. Since we had a lot of old dressers and stuff this was not as hard as it might seem. When Alice saw me doing this she decided to follow the example of her favorite brother. So, once when no one else was in the house, Alice was following me around the room, stepping on the furniture. I stepped on the radio and then onto a chair. Alice wasn't supposed to step on the glass part of the radio, but she did and I heard a sharp crack! It broke. Alice and I could not get the radio to work again. This was not a big deal to us because we had television, but we knew it would be a big deal to our parents.

"Don't tell, Tink! Don't tell on me!"

"Mom and Dad are going to find out sooner or later, Alice Marie."

"But you don't have to tell them that I did it. Please! Please!"

"Oh, all right, I guess."

It wasn't long afterward that my mother noticed that the radio was broken. "How did the radio get broken?"

"Somebody stepped on it," I said.

"Was it you?"

What should I say? I had promised not to tell on my sister. My mother knew that I stepped on the furniture; at least once before she had yelled at me for doing it. She had no idea that Alice did the same thing, and probably would not have believe it if I had told her. Her special one-and-only sweet little girl do a thing like that? It was unthinkable for my mother. Besides, I thought, it sort of was my fault because Alice was only following the example of her older brother. My mother interrupted my thoughts.

"All right, Douglas Wayne _____, you are in big trouble now.” I always knew when I was in big trouble when she called me by my full name. “You just sit on that chair in the living room until your father gets home." When my father got home he punished me.

A couple of years later the still broken radio resided upstairs in the Solon house. In fact the radio was right next to my bed, perhaps just to remind me of what "I" had done. James and I shared that double bed; James had chosen the side with the radio. James’ bedroom rules were pretty clear. James drew an imaginary line down the middle of the bed. If I were to extend so much as a finger over the line, the finger would “rightfully” get pounded by James. If I were to roll over in my sleep and be partially on his side of the bed, I would repeatedly get a hard elbow in my ribs until I got back on my side of the bed. If he were to accidentally roll over to my side of the bed then I was free to try to gently push him back, if I could do it without waking him up. Bigger brothers, I learned, always make the rules to their own advantage.

As long as "we" obeyed the rules, we got along fine. And most of the time it was great. Sometimes we would just lie there and talk until Mom would yell, "Be quiet, and go to sleep."

One time I saw my older brother Richard playing with the vacuum cleaner hose. He was talking into it, and it sounded like the sound was coming from the end of the hose, instead of from his mouth. That gave me an idea. Before going to bed that night I took the hose and stretch it out under the pillows on our bed. As James was getting ready for bed I casually told him that I had been playing with the radio and it seemed to be working again. Actually I had played with the radio that day, just to make my plan "honest".

"Oh, really?" James began to fiddle with the dials. "That sure was a dumb thing you did when you stepped on the radio. Well, it doesn't seem to be working now."

"Well, that's the funny thing about it. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. Why don't you leave it on, and maybe it will come on by itself while we are in bed." He looked at me a little strangely, but left it on. We then said our prayers, "Father-in-Heaven, bless DavidRichardJamesDouglasAliceMarie and Donald..." We always went through the list of brothers and sisters as fast as we could, without thinking about it. It was a song we sang before we jumped into bed. A little while later I quietly reached under my pillow and pulled out one end of the vacuum cleaner hose. I put the end of the hose up to my lips. "Hello, this is your radio. We will now play ‘Give Said the Little Stream.’” I began to sing, “Give said the...."

"Hey, how did you that?"

How did he know? Maybe he was just guessing. I thought I'd try to fool him a little longer. "Did you hear that? It sounded like the radio was working again."

James got up and turned on the light. Returning to the bed he picked up his pillow and saw the hose. "So that's it!"

"Leave it there. We can talk and Mom won't even hear us." That sounded fun to James, so he turned off the light and got back into bed. "Hello James, this is Douglas talking."

"Hello Tink, this is James talking." We talked meaningless stuff for awhile. We must have sounded like a couple of ham radio operators, only I didn’t know about them until years later.

It didn't last long, however. In a day or two my mother started demanding to know who took the vacuum cleaner hose, and they better bring it back if they knew what was good for them. I went and got the hose from under our pillows.

For the next ten years we lugged that radio around with us in all our moves. And whenever someone would come to our house my mother would say, "See this radio? It hasn't worked since Douglas stepped on it. Yes, it is kinda funny now. Aren't children always doing the dumbest things?" Keeping silence on who really broke the radio was harder to take than the punishment. And my parents never found out for the next forty years.