My Pre-Radio Life

This morning, my sister emailed me this picture of a cute baby wearing headphones and called it "Young Martina". I guess it was the headphones that made her think it was me. But I was never that cute, or pale, a baby.

I had to respond and tell her that no, it wasn't me. Despite how obsessed I am with all things radio now in my adulthood, I wasn't so into it as an infant that there ever would have been gigantic, professional grade headphones on my head at any point while I was in my crib. And certainly, I was not the type at that time to listen to anything with such a blissed-out, bemused, eye-closed look on my face. She's so silly, that sister of mine!

Looking back, I'm sure I wasn't very aware even of all my radio listening options let alone how to actually make radio when I was a child. Growing up in SoCal in the 80's, we had one very old, used tuner that was probably donated to the fam by some local church and it was always tuned to the Mighty 690, an AM station that played a lot of Top 40, only 10 songs on their playlist at a time. But, those were my favorite 10 songs of that particular month, easily. That's also where I always got my Sunday hit of Casey Kasem whom I thought was a genius. I remember my sisters and I always freaking out when someone tuned the stereo away from that spot on the dial. I was convinced I'd never find it again on the crowded AM spectrum out of L.A. and San Diego.

Unless you count me recording the Silver Spoons intro theme onto a portable cassette player by holding it up to the TV so I could have it on a mix tape, I also never had aspirations of becoming a radio producer. When you listen back to those tapes now, you can actually hear 9-year-old me off-mic shushing people in the room. God, I was a control freak even then! Or, when I used to read books out loud into the same tape recorder and play it back to myself at night as I went to bed because no one ever had the time to read me to sleep. That's more audiobook than radio broadcast. Sigh.

I must've been cute in those days, but not cute like that kid in the picture. My cute was one of patheticness. That's a totally different kind of cute.