Do you remember things that never happened? Evidently I do.

There was a time when we 'Watched' the radio!

There was an interesting part of my life that is seldom paralleled. My dad was a preacher. He once pastored a church that had a two bedroom parsonage. At that time I was in the seventh grade and Shirl was in High school (She is much older than I! LOL). Dad knew his tenure there would not be long enough for another parsonage to be built. So he opted to put me in the back yard, because Shirl needed her privacy, she was growing up (you know boobs and stuff). We had a large back yard. He moved a small trailer in the rear with elec.


That was my home, well mine and my dog Ace. Back then you were lucky to have a radio and I had one. The radio had no cover or knobs. I could move the selecting capacitor with my finger to find stations. Ace and I would listen to the radio for hours into the night. I knew all the programs. Mr & Mrs North, The Squeaking Door, the FBI in Peace and War, Oh there was Matt Dillon and ‘Gun Smoke’. The Green Hornet , Johnny Dollar, Lum & Abner, The Great Guildersleeve, Boston Blackie and many more.

The funny thing is there were two programs I loved, that no one seems to remember. I cannot find a record of them on the archives of the internet. They were:

“If By a Stroke of Fate” (that I mentioned in an earlier blog entry) and “Can you Top This?”

Now the first one was a “What if?” serious program, but the other was strictly a fifteen minute program of telling jokes. The Audience would send in jokes, supposedly a professional comedian would tell it in front of a live audience and some kind of noise meter would judge the applause. I loved it and lay there and laughed and laughed. Ace thought I had gone crazy for fifteen minutes. But he seemed to understand I would get over this problem.

(As I said, We Watched the Radio!)

I remember even writing a joke and sending it in, of course mine was never used, but I wish I could remember the joke now.

Please tell me if you ever heard one of these programs, I know I am not making it up!

Nite Shipslog
PS: One of Will Rogers’ sayings was:
Never slap a man who's chewing tobacco.

PS2..I just found a mention of ‘can you top this’ on the net.