My own childhood memories of CBSRMT
RMT was my first radio love and this page is here for other RMT fans who
might feel the same way. You would not believe how many RMT
people are out there. Many of us were alone with the RMT hobby growing
up, now we find each other on the internet. Great stuff!
As a child I spent most of my allowance on 9v batteries and those ochre
Radio Shack C-120 cassettes (remember the free battery punchcard or the
animals with radios stuffed inside?), hiding AM radios under my pillow
so my parents wouldn't know I was awake and listening to RMT. My ears
would get sore from lying on the speaker or from having a cheap white
earphone in for hours. When I could get away with it, I'd set my clock
radio (with the numbers printed on flip-flip-flipping metal leaves)
to come on at 9pm and it would play WFAA 570 AM for the whole hour...
Sometimes I was too scared to listen, but more scared to get out of bed
to turn the clock radio off.
I even had a handlebar-mounted AM radio on my
ten-speed so I could listen while I peddled around the block. Strange
kid.
It always seemed magical to me that someone could be talking
over there and you could hear them over here. The
fascination never left me, and nowadays my interest expresses itself in
listening to OTR, shortwave,
and scanners. I am a radio geek. I have
a ham license (kb5yyl) but I just mainly listen.
In a way I blame RMT for my geekiness: after a year or so I realized
that you could buy a battery charger for about $10, a couple of 9v
NiCads for $10 each, and basically have batteries forever. You could
also recharge the old carbon-zinc batts if you were careful to remove
them before they popped...
When Fred Gwynne and then E.G. Marshall died, I was a little depressed.
Most people knew Fred from the Munsters and Mr. Marshall from movies;
I knew them from work on the CBSRMT. My dog was named Marshall, in
fact. It's strange that most people never knew there was another whole
world of radio acting out there.
You would be surprised at how many emails I get saying that other people
had similar memories of the CBSRMT.
And I'm glad to have met you all. You're good people.
Listening now v. listening then
When I was listening to the shows I was a child; now I am nearly forty. Hearing the
shows again is great fun but it also tells me much about myself.
One of the strange things about listening to RMT now is that there is
relatively little horror in it. My memory had been playing tricks on me; I
though it had been mainly scary stories. Maybe they were scary stories
in a way: adult relationships that I could not get my child's mind around.
And in retrospect there is also a lot of topicality that I didn't catch at all as a child: abortion,
the rise of feminism, VietNam, gas prices, inflation.
Other fans' memories
Here's a great story another fan wrote to relate:
I was quite lucky to have made a trip to NYC back in 1981 to sit in on
two CBSRMT tapings. I sat in the control room with the audio guy, while
Himan led Tony Roberts and a couple other famous (yet strangely unknown
to me) actors through the magic. Himan was a delightful and charming
person to me, and there was a terrific energy to the room during the
experience... even though you know these folks were basically working
for AFTRA scale. I pulled off this little visit thanks to my Mom,
who wrote a "special to the Washington Post" feature about CBSRMT back
in 74 or 75, entitled "The Door Still Creaks".
(from Tom Way, posted here with his kind permission.)
