It
was in the late 1950’s that I became a regular listener to Radio
Luxemburg, the English service in the evening on 208m Medium Wave. I
vividly remember sitting at the dining table with my father enjoying
‘Wooden Heart’ by Elvis on Luxy. It must have been 1960, as at
the time the song was in the hit parade for weeks on end. Tuning in
to Radio Luxembourg was like a breath of fresh air, maybe even akin
to being fed a few liberal doses of pure oxygen. Until early in 1960
Luxemburg was the only radio station in the whole of Europe that
played the latest records non-stop. It
was the same year I started to learn English at school. I was 13
then.
My
teacher in Heist, Xaverian Brother Ildefons Rotsaert, spoke proper
King’s English, but devoted much of his tutoring time perfecting
his hate of Communism. Although I was very determined to do well,
after the first week I proved to be the worst pupil at English in the
whole class. Apparently I had even failed to grasp the correct
spelling of the ‘definite article’. The shame was too much to
bear! This wasn’t supposed to happen. My father’s family had
spent the entire war in England and many family members felt more
British than the Brits. No wonder I kept quiet about what I
considered to be ‘an absolute disaster’. Before my parents ever
found out I had turned things around. So much so, that just days
later I was ‘best of class’ for English, and remained so. However
that was not the case
for many of the other subjects. But I considered that to be of lesser
importance…
A few months earlier, by continuously pestering my parents, and purposely doing rather well at school, I was allowed to choose my very own transistor radio. Well, that is not exactly true. My parents bought me a portable radio. It was the cheapest model available, but still a heavy strain on my mother’s purse. For a while I was ecstatic with my -medium wave only- red and cream coloured ‘Tesla Minor’. It was built in Czechoslovakia but still had vacuum tubes instead of transistors. As a result my infatuation with radio soon turned into too high maintenance a love affair. My Tesla Minor became a major disappointment as it only performed after ingesting a bulky and expensive battery, which in addition was very short lived. Especially since I spent long hours listening to Radio Veronica, the offshore station which had just started broadcasting off the Dutch coast in April 1960. That was a full four years before Caroline’s bell tolled. I remember walking to my grandmother’s during the Summer of 1960, with my Tesla tuned to 192m, listening to Veronica. I might just as well not have bothered to bring the portable. On a warm day in Heist one could hear Veronica’s hits and ‘Nur Die’ commercials just about everywhere as they poured into the streets from every open door and window. That Summer it seemed all land based stations were out of favour. No prizes for guessing why.
The
luxury of having a portable tube radio however utterly drained my
finances. Hence, the Tesla set was soon demoted. It was put in the
corner of our veranda and the small loudspeaker was hooked up to the
main radio. That way we could also listen whilst enjoying the Summer
sunshine. The main thing was that it didn’t cost me anything
anymore, which meant that I could save up for a proper transistor
radio.
More of AJ's radio- and other anecdotes.
One of the first broadcasters I was captivated by, when initially roaming the shortwave, was “Happy Station”. That was the special Sunday morning programme broadcast worldwide by Radio Netherlands. Little did I know that many years later I would be in more or less the same time slot when presenting “North Sea Goes DX” on RNI. “Happy Station” was in fact the oldest running radio programme in existence. It was presented by the multi-lingual Eddy Startz (1899-1976), who had started his transmissions for the Dutch company Philips in Eindhoven in 1928. As a young boy in 1960 I was very much taken with Startz’s happy chatter and the mixture of Dutch street organ music and marches by John Philip Souza. Although Souza wrote over a hundred marches, the one that sticks out in my memory is “Stars and Stripes Forever”. On the rare occasions that he was stormbound and at home, my father was also very fond of the programme. In the kitchen, only yards away, my mother was oblivious to it. She seemed to prefer cooking Sunday dinner to any form of entertainment that did not include the then German heartthrob Freddy Quinn. Who were we to complain, when we were about to be treated to succulent chicken in a thick brown sauce! It has to be said, all my mother’s dishes were deliciously Delia, avant la lettre.
