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Radios & Jukeboxes

October 15, 2025 by DickH Posted in Uncategorized Leave a Comment

Radios and Jukeboxes

By Leo Racicot

When I was a kid, The Golden Age of Radio was coming to its end. Still, we had two radios at home and listened regularly; our mother, aunt and grandmother had come of age during The Great Depression when radio was at its peak as pretty much the only form of entertainment and information available, other than live theater which was financially out-of-their-reach. In the kitchen, on top of the fridge, was a yellow portable number, with handle. Ma always had it playing, especially as wake-up on school mornings. Next to it — Albert the Drinking Duck (a popular toy of the day, a battery-operated plastic bird made to bob up and down into the bowl of water placed at his feet. Sometimes, the radio song that was playing was in sync with his bobbing. I got a kick out of that. In a corner of the living room, stood a large cabinet radio. It seemed to me this was always there in the corner. I adorned the top with an Infant of Prague statuette. The window displaying the needle indicator, the pointer that displayed the station frequency, was an eerie alien spaceship orange and I liked looking at it, fiddling with the dial, trying to find a cool song. The cabinet below opened up to a record player which my mother sometimes let me listen to if I was good. She’d put the record on for me and we’d sit there for hours listening, a mostly Sunday activity.

Whenever she took us on excursions, our Aunt Marie would put the radio on. She loved the singers of The Great American Song Book: Doris Day, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin. Her favorite was Al Martino. She’d sing along and coax Diane and me to join in. Diane never would but I was too afraid not to. This was when I came to love that era of singers myself and later in Life, I was lucky to see Peggy Lee, Rosemary Clooney and Tony Bennett in person. I have three friends for whom the radio is still daily listening. One never would buy a television set and relies to this day on radio for her entertainment. I find something old-fashioned and charming about this. In Lowell, we had two radio stations: WLLH was located on the topmost floor of the old Giant Store at the corner of Dutton and Broadway. WCAP (“The Voice of the Valley”) had its offices down on Central Street. As far as I know, it’s still broadcasting. Our next-door neighbor’s nephew, Henry Achin, had a program on ‘CAP for years. The Achins were big in Lowell (real estate and law). Henry was blind and he and his seeing-eye dog were a familiar sight making their way to-and-from his job. I remember the focus of Henry’s program was Franco-American history and when I went as an undergraduate to Assumption College, Worcester, and was so nervous to be away from home for the first time, finding Henry there as a student was a comfort. I didn’t stay long at Assumption; not only did my scholarship not cover extracurricular expenses but when I was standing in the cafeteria line, the man in front of me gave a sudden shudder and dropped dead right in front of me. I thought, “What the heck kind of a place is this?!!” and hightailed it home as fast as I could. I haven’t seen Henry in ages and ages and thought I read his obituary in The Sun a few years ago but I can’t find information to confirm that on Google. WCAP is still alive and well, with offices on Central Street next to Brew’d Awakenings.

Some of my favorite radio personalities, though not local, were Jess Cain, the “morning drive guy”, Murray the K (known as “The Fifth Beatle”) and Wolfman Jack. Whenever I’m sitting in the barber’s chair, I like looking at a photo my barber has on the wall of him with Wolfman.

A form of entertainment I don’t see anymore is the jukebox. Back in time, every restaurant had either a large one or there were smaller ones found in each dining booth, affixed to the wall right next to the customer. A metal lever allowed the customer to browse through “pages” of song selections to see which ones he/she would like to play. The cost was a dime for one song or a quarter for three “plays”. These jukeboxes were my favorite and our mother always let Diane and me pick a selection or two. The fun of it was waiting for the songs you picked to play when it was their turn in the queue. One special jukebox memory — before George’s Pizza on the corner of Broadway and School Streets closed up shop and moved further down on Broadway, across from Anton’s Cleaners, that location housed “Pete’s, a breakfast diner-type place. One morning, Diane and I were there for breakfast with our mother. I remember the place was redolent with the aroma of French Toast and Petula Clark’s big hit Downtown was blasting on the jukebox. The whole restaurant was vibrating with the sound of Clark’s song. A beatnik couple got up and did a swing dance right in the middle of the floor. To this day, whenever I smell French toast, it gets me singing Downtown and thinking of “Pete’s”.

My friend, Elena, told me yesterday some places (clubs/bars) do still have jukeboxes but that now they’re digital, the way casino slot machines are digital and — “That’s taken all the fun out of them”. She sighed.