Clock radios are a weird little affection of mine. I bought my current one, a Boston Acoustics Recepter, perhaps six years ago, and I’m still happy with it. I’m sure this is an adult record. (I’m usually a clock-radioizing creep, incapable of a long-term relationship.) I guess my record before this one was when I was doing it all with X-10, and had 400 watts of spotlights shining on me in addition to the audible alarm. That was right after I got my first “real” job and was paranoid beyond all reason about oversleeping.
When I was little, my grandparents in Panama City had one with a green LED display in the guest room that I’ve never seen since. It looked like it was composed of standard seven-segment displays. But when the time changed, it didn’t simply add and subtract segments as needed to make the new time. It did a little animation, where this piece of one segment would fall out, and that piece of another segment would come on, and so forth. It took it two or three full seconds to change, and I liked it very much.
I never really needed an alarm clock until I was in high school, though I did have a talking Batman alarm clock that’s worth, like, $730,000 now.
When I was about seven my dad gave me a clock radio for music. It was an old Arvin, with odometer-style clock digits—the sort you could hear changing with a mechanical whisper, given a quiet enough room—and a big bright drum display for the radio. It probably had about the same footprint as a shoebox, though perhaps two-thirds of its height, and it had a darkish woodgrain plastic cabinet with a brushed metal faceplate.
I bet I listened to that thing for a thousand hours. There was a station at 92.7 in Talladega, whose call letters I can’t remember. There was WQEN at 103.7 in Gadsden, which the web tells me is still around today, though in Birmingham. And there was my favorite, WHMA at 100.5 in Anniston.
It’s a country station now, but in the mid- to late ’70s it was Lawrence Welkish, with stuff like Andre Kostelanetz and Ferrante & Teicher. I liked it because it came in strong, and also because it was good falling-asleep music. Plus, on Saturday mornings they had a show called Trade Talk, which was essentially some guy reading buy-sell-trade classifieds. No idea why I was so enraptured by such, but I was.
I get frustrated that I can’t ever find a picture of that clock radio online (or my grandparents’ green LED one, for that matter). When I Google and/or eBay search “Arvin clock radio,” most everything that ever comes up is too old. I still poke around once in a while, though. I’ll get lucky sometime. (The image shown isn’t as cool as mine was, but it’s that same basic layout, and it does unambiguously show the “odometer” numbers, as opposed to the flip-pages.)
Tonight I did discover a great blog while looking called Push. Click. Touch. It’s about how we interact with technology—lots of good stuff on cognitive science, icon design, symbols, and the like. I was definitely digging it and was considering adding it to my blogroll, but I thought “nah, I got to the end of it too quickly. It’s not updated often enough.” (Except I was 15 or so pages in and had been reading for 45 minutes without realizing it.) Sold.
You might also like:
- Casio produces the best geek watch yet
I’ve had my Casio PAW-1300, previously briefly discussed in this post, for about a month now. Price … - Where can you find a good personal “radio station”?
Sometimes I like to pick out exactly what I want to listen to. And sometimes I like to be surprised…. - The ’80s car stereo song lives
I’ve suspected for some time that when most folks say they’re into ’80s music, they don’t mean what … - Review: Mission Power Battery Base for Amazon Echo
The ideal place in our house for our Amazon Echo is the south end of the bar in the kitchen. If it w… - You know, stealing really is stealing
I happened upon this article about hotel room thievery during my unexpectedly leisurely afternoon. (…
Truly, Bo, some of the things you write about crack me up. Clock radios? Really?
The bottom picture looks a lot like the clock radio I was given by MY grandparents when I was probably in fourth or fifth grade. Mine had flip-numbers, though, and I could hear the little motor whirring up to drop the next digit if the room was quiet enough. The alarm on the thing scared the ever loving shit out of me, though, and for that reason, I hated it. It sounded EXACTLY like the school’s fire alarm, and the model I had either didn’t allow you to wake to the radio or I was never smart enough to figure out how to make it do that. I learned, in about a week, to wake up a minute or so BEFORE the alarm went off and literally scared me out of bed.
Well, now, Mrs. Chili, I told you it was “weird” in the very first sentence. 🙂
I also think it’s interesting that the clock radio is really the only “combination” durable good that American society has widely adopted. (That’s not my observation, but I can’t remember where I read/heard it.)