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One evening this past week, my wife Carol and I watched a 2019 movie titled the same as this essay that you have just begun to read. I cannot speak for Carol, but I can tell you I myself thoroughly enjoyed the film.
The movie was set in modern times, but it put me in mind of, probably, January, 1964, when I was halfway through my freshman year at Rio High School. I had at that time my own little bedroom in the second story of my grandparents’ little farmhouse. Or not quite a bedroom, I suppose I should say, but sort of just my own few square yards of floor space with a twin bed and a nightstand and an east-facing window but without a closet, between the head of the stairs and a real bedroom, also small, in which my two brothers, younger than I, shared an ancient iron bed with a sagging, lumpy mattress beneath a sharply sloping ceiling. The boys crossed through my room to get to theirs. Our sister had a larger room, to the west of the stairs. Our mother and our grandparents had bedrooms downstairs. Our dad was away, overseas, having just begun a new eighteen-month assignment with the U.S. Army.
Four miles away, on another farm, Steve Halvorsen, a year older than I, a best friend then and still a best friend these many years later, occupied a similar upstairs bedroom in his grandparents’ farmhouse. If you know Steve and you know me, you might be surprised to find out how much we have in common.
Seven hundred thirty miles straight south from Rio, Wisconsin, in 1964, Top 40 radio station KAAY was broadcasting out of Little Rock, Arkansas, at 50,000 watts, 1090 on the AM dial. I am told the station is still broadcasting today, but no longer as a Top 40 station.
Yesterday, as I prepared to set down this reminiscence for you, my dear Reader, I sought to verify that I accurately remember every glorious detail of rural Rio in 1964. I phoned Steve (who presently resides not four miles, but a mere four blocks, from where I now live), and, yes, yes, we pretty much, Steve and I, agreed that we both listened late at night to KAAY on our very own AM/FM transistor radios, each one the size of a hardcover novel, each featuring an extendable chromed antenna and a primitive plastic earphone on a flimsy twisted cord. Steve pointed out yesterday that, back in early 1964, even though he had to rise seven days a week in deep winter’s darkness to milk his grandparents’ cows, he stayed up late at night, as did I, to hear the hits, because, for some atmospheric reason that we still don’t quite understand, KAAY’s 50,000 watts were not sufficient, until something like 10:30 p.m., to push its signal through the clouds all the way from Little Rock to Rio in a more or less static-free form.
Steve recalled, as I did, that we, listening to KAAY, discovered a British singing group called the Beatles, some weeks before they ever appeared on Ed Sullivan and rocketed to fame in America. We went to school the next day and excitedly asked our classmates, “Have you heard The Beatles?”
Until then, those not fortunate enough to have upstairs bedrooms and big transistor radios had not. “The who?” they replied.
Steve told them, “No, no. Not The Who. They’re good, too. The Beatles. From England. Believe me, they’re gonna be big!”
Steve has often been right about a lot of things.
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