Swap Shop ran a little longer than usual, and the last item of the day was an antique wooden radio. He remembered his grandfather’s Crosley 669, which he was allowed to play when he was a child. Back then, the broadcasts sounded antique, the music muzzled and full of soft pops and windy static, as if there were a fire inside the cabinet, the announcer sounding faintly like Edward R. Murrow even when advertising color TVs. Gramps let him stay up late, and after eleven o’clock Cliff would switch on the police band, which hadn’t broadcast police radio since the 1940s, but way down on the left side of the dial, he could tease in a ham-radio operator in Australia who always talked about fishing. He would click a different knob and the set would land on the abandoned shortwave band, but sometimes he could hear what sounded like Chinese, the radio chanting in a far-off and mystical faintness, coming and going like consciousness during a fragmented dream.
He jotted down the seller’s number and after many rings he spoke with a creaky-voiced woman named Selma McKeithen, who lived down in nearby Blue Shaft. She wasn’t sure about the radio’s current condition, only that her deceased son, who had owned an electronics repair shop, had restored it years before, and she wanted fifty dollars for it.
Cliff called in to the waterworks and took the day off.
Blue Shaft, West Virginia, was just twenty miles from Cliff’s house. It had been slowly dying over the past six decades, one business closing up per year, ten newly boarded-up houses per annum, fifty young workers moving out in the same time period, until the town felt like a big country house abandoned by its many grown children. The growly old announcer on the radio read his announcements for yard sales and used car lots as if he could barely see the printed text.
Cliff drove past many dusty, empty storefronts. Behind them in the distance hovered mud-colored mountains ribboned with seams of low-grade coal. Mrs. McKeithen lived in a large two-story frame house surrounded by broad, peeling galleries. He knocked and waited a long time, thinking he’d been forgotten or was being ignored because the radio had already been sold. But after six or seven minutes of knocking and waiting, he heard slow, puffy footsteps and saw the white ceramic doorknob turn as slowly as the second hand on a clock.
Mrs. McKeithen was straight in the back and had eyes the color of blue willow china, but she was very old. She apologized for being so slow, explaining, as she motioned him in, that she’d just turned ninety-eight. After she closed the door, she evaluated him up and down. “You’re a little thick through the middle, aren’t you?”
He didn’t know what to say to that.
Putting up a hand, Mrs. McKeithen said, “My father used to say that a fat, happy dog wasn’t happy long.” Leading him to a back bedroom over her creaking floors, she pointed to the radio. “It belonged to my oldest son, Vernon.” A large mahogany floor model stood next to a tall window. A copper antenna wire snaked through the bottom of the sash and ran, he was told, up to the roof where it was strung between two sticks, one at the front of the house, one at the rear.
“It’s bigger than I thought.” He turned it from the wall and saw it was a Philco 41-290 that brought in AM, shortwave, and police band. “Does it work?”
She snapped a hand toward the wall. “Plug it in, my boy. It runs on electricity, you know.”
“I don’t think so. It could go up in smoke.”
“Oh, nonsense. Don’t you have any courage? It should play just fine.”
Cliff gave her a doubtful look. “Can’t be too careful.”
“Oh, for goodness sake.” Mrs. McKeithen slowly bent over to pick up the plug.
“Please don’t. Let’s just make a deal. Will you take forty for it?”
She straightened up and said, “And what will you do with that extra ten dollars in your pocket? Buy a yacht, perhaps?”
He looked down at the dusty cabinet. With some furniture wax he should be able to see his reflection. “Yeah, okay. Fifty it is.”
She held out her hand, wide palmed, not shaking. “My husband says, or said, that Vernon put many new components inside that old dusty thing. He used to make a really good living before his heart went bad.”
Cliff pulled out his wallet and frowned into it. “Oh, has your husband passed away?”
She shook her frosty head. “No, we just got divorced last year.”
“Really? How long were you married?”
She touched her chin and closed one eye. “Seventy-three years.”
Cliff’s mouth fell open. “Why’d you get a divorce after seventy-three years?”
She shrugged. “Oh, we wanted to wait until the children were dead.”
—
Later that night, Cliff used a dolly to roll the big Philco into his man cave at the rear of the house, where it joined a mouse-nibbled anteater, part of a broken B-24 propeller, a giant locomotive piston, a jukebox with two bullet holes through the glass, a straitjacket covered with bloodstains, a collage made with twenty red hot-water bottles, and many other oddities, all bought on Swap Shop or given to him by friends who were fine judges of bad taste. An acquaintance from work had once given him a plastic donkey whose backpack was filled with cigarettes. When Cliff lifted the donkey’s tail the first time, a stale Lucky Strike extruded from the animal’s rear end.
Late that night, Cliff pulled the back panel off the Philco and found the insides to be remarkably clean. Nearly every tube, capacitor, and resistor had been replaced, and some modern components seemed to have been added. The plug wire was restoration-grade line sheathed in bronze-colored cloth. Cliff decided to string a temporary antenna wire around the room and fire the set up.
He began his tour on AM with a click and a hum, then a rising whine like a musical saw, so he turned the selector knob and brought in the local country music station. The sound was like his gramps’ machine, but cleaner—a big, soft sound with no edges to Taylor Swift. He rolled up on an oldies broadcast and listened while working on a lab report for the county. Then he tried out the police band, which was empty. Cliff found it hard to believe that anything on earth was empty, much less a radio frequency. He turned the tuning knob at a creeping pace, and finally, down at the left side of the dial, he heard a ship call for a bar pilot to come out into the Gulf of Mexico from the mouth of the Mississippi. The conversation was full of depths, currents, and locations and lasted two or three minutes before fading as though the pilot were indeed floating off into the night. Then calypso music drifted in for a moment and left at once, the melody like a supple deer passing through headlights.
For a long time there was nothing, then an old man singing “Dos gardenias para ti,” solo in a soft voice, followed by more dead air, interrupted by a tickle of accordion, then more silence. Cliff made himself a whiskey sour and pulled a chair up next to the radio, turning a knob to the shortwave band. From Del Rio, Texas, an amateur station announced its existence and began broadcasting a waterfall of Spade Cooley’s western swing music. Much later, tuning farther up the dial, he picked up nothing at all until he hit a steady stream of news in English from the Ivory Coast, and he moved to the sofa. Cliff and his wife had hardly ever left the state, their vacation time of two weeks a year not giving them much latitude for it, but this night, for the first time, he began to understand how vast and varied the world was, and he listened late until he rolled off to sleep in the trunk of the ’47 Plymouth.
—
Tammy woke him up in time to shower and shave. She mentioned that the radio smelled hot, and if he didn’t want to burn the house down he might take it over to old man Blumenthal’s electronics repair shop to get it checked for safety. He brought the big unit in on the way to work and picked it up when he knocked off, Mr. Blumenthal telling him it was safe.
As he helped load the heavy cabinet the repairman said, “You know, this old gal has been redesigned. I mean, things have not only been replaced, but everything’s modified. It’s like somebody was trying to make it bring in a specific station more strongly. I’ve never seen such circuitry, especially
in an antique box like this.”
Cliff closed his hatchback and took a breath. “I just wanted to know if it’s going to catch fire.”
“No, no,” Blumenthal said. “These things tended to run pretty warm. It’s normal. Hope you tune in something interesting.”
That evening, Cliff and Tammy sat together in the man cave and watched a football game until the score reached 48–18 and his wife stood up. “No sense in burning time on this turkey. How’s your radio working?”
“Blumenthal said it was okay.” Cliff turned on the shortwave band and immediately hit a Delta airliner asking for a change in altitude. But that was all, just a shooting star of words and nothing else. Rolling down the dial he found another ship-to-shore broadcast, a tugboat pilot asking for a lineup at a lock on the Ohio River. Then nothing. “Late at night,” he told her, “a few more things come on.”
She crossed her legs and leaned toward the set. “This is kind of creepy, like we’re spying or something. I mean, it’s fun.”
After two rounds of drinks they discovered a program of belly-dance music from Turkey. Tammy jumped up and swayed her arms and popped her hips until she fell over onto the Plymouth sofa. Around eleven-thirty they gave up listening as the music faded out.
—
For the next two months Cliff developed a habit of searching the dial right before bedtime, sometimes as late as one o’clock on weekends. He heard marimba music, Cuban club music, Alaskan diatribe, backwoods preaching from three continents, Radio Australia broadcasts to New Guinea in pidgin English, all weak signals except for one bright broadcasting point in the Solomon Islands, from a town, the announcer said, near Gizo.
One morning in December, Cliff got a call from his boss, who said that a pipe had frozen and burst in the attic of the lab and that he didn’t need to come in because the place was flooded. He watched the news in the living room for a while, then went into his cave to see if anything was on shortwave. He wasn’t having much luck until he reached the spot on the dial for the station in the Solomons, which came in strong. At nine o’clock someone was broadcasting an old recording of a female comedian, originally taped at a nightclub in the Catskills, the announcer noted, in the early forties. Cliff checked his laptop and discovered it was after one a.m. in Gizo. The old Philco had eight preset buttons, and on a hunch he punched each one; four delivered old stations like WWL and WSM, three hit nothing, but the eighth landed the radio back in the Solomons. He listened to the same fast-talking woman deliver a series of vintage barroom narratives. Her bright alto was energy itself sailing over the noise of the club.
One began, “A customer walks into a bar trailed by a big golden retriever. The bartender hollers, ‘We don’t allow dogs in here.’ The customer says, ‘But my dog, Jane, can talk.’ ‘I don’t care,’ says the bartender. ‘I get two talking dogs a week in here.’ [Audience laughter.] ‘Yes, but this dog can do what no other dog can do.’ ‘What’s that?’ he asks. ‘She can shop. I’ll give her a dollar, and I bet you ten bucks she’ll bring back what you ask her to.’ ‘I’ll take that bet,’ the bartender says. ‘Ask her to go out and get the evening edition of the city paper.’ [More laughter.] The customer gives the dog a dollar and sends her out the door. A minute later she comes back with the right newspaper in her mouth and says, distinctly, ‘Here you go.’ ‘Well, that’s okay,’ the bartender says, handing the owner a ten. ‘But let’s see if she can do something a little more complicated.’ The dog actually speaks up and says, ‘Okay, bud. Give me a try.’ [Laughter again.] The bartender gives the dog a ten and says, ‘Hundred-dollar bet. Down the street is Jim’s diner. Get me a large hamburger, no mustard or pickles, extra mayonnaise, and a large order of fries.’ ‘Okay,’ the dog says, and bolts out the door. Fifteen minutes later she comes back with a bag in her mouth holding the correct order. The bartender is fuming. ‘I’ll give her a hundred and we’ll up the bet to a thousand dollars. Here’s the deal, girlie: Four blocks south of here is the Paradise Liquor Store. I want a quart of Jack Daniel’s black label and a bottle of French wine from the Loire Valley, vintage 1926.’ Jane takes the hundred-dollar bill in her mouth and trots off. Twenty minutes later, the two men get worried. After an hour, they go out on the streets looking for the dog. Eventually, the customer looks in the window of a beauty parlor and sees his dog lying back in an adjustable chair, her coat perfectly brushed and tinted, a jeweled collar around her neck, her ears getting a permanent wave, and an Asian girl laboring over her glossy pink claws. Her owner runs inside and yells, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ The dog says, ‘I’ve never had a hundred dollars before.’ ” [Audience roars.]
The comedienne delivered two more stories, and then in a crash of nightclub orchestra music she sailed off on a wave of applause. Whoever she was, the long joke had been her stock-in-trade.
The announcer, in an odd English accent, asked the listeners to tune in at 100 hours on Thursdays and Saturdays to hear more comedy recordings from Sally Gruen’s 1940s performances. Cliff turned off the set, but the brightness of the comedienne’s voice stayed with him. She sounded so happy. The nightclub crowd loved her. She must have been famous.
The following Saturday he caught the whole program, and he had his work hours adjusted so he could listen to the Thursday program as well, which lasted a little over fifteen minutes. The comedienne was a person not even the Internet knew anything about. Into the new year he listened, laughing, captured by the voice and its shining rhythms. Vernon McKeithen might have appreciated the comedienne’s work, since the old Philco had been rewired to focus on this one spot on the dial. He wondered about Sally Gruen, when she had died, where she was from. But just as great a mystery was why these tapes were being broadcast from half a world away.
According to his laptop, only one shortwave station was left in the Gizo region. The man he reached there said in wordy English that his station aired no comedy programs, but there was an old Japanese gentleman living on a nearby island who, as a hobby slightly aided by the government, ran renovated World War Two surplus equipment twenty-four hours a day. Cliff got a phone number and reached a Mr. Matsumoto, the third shift announcer and owner, who spoke excellent English and talked at length about his affection for outdated broadcasting equipment.
Eventually Cliff got a chance to ask about the comedy program they aired at one a.m.
Mr. Matsumoto laughed and said, “That’s because we have cheapest broadcasting rates.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The programs you mention are a series of forty-eight tapes recorded in the early 1940s in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles by the comedienne’s husband. We get calls from all around the world about them, maybe four or five a week. We’ve run them over and over for twenty-three years now.”
“People don’t get tired of them?”
The man laughed again. “We have a widespread audience, mostly by accident. Besides, jokes are like silly friends you can stand to meet at least twice a year.”
When Cliff asked how Mr. Matsumoto got hold of the tapes, the phone grew quiet for a few seconds.
“It’s kind of odd telling this. About twenty years ago I visited my sister, who lives in West Virginia. She had an old Zenith that she wanted restored, so I found a man named Vernon who ran a local shop. He was a skinny blond guy, very tall, and just as interested in radio history as I was. We met every day the two weeks I spent at my sister’s. Years later, Vernon sent me ten thousand dollars in the form of a stock-based endowment to broadcast his mother’s comedy routines, and eventually we digitized her old tapes. I tried to reach him a couple years ago and found that he had passed away.”
Cliff had to sit down before he could ask, “Really? His mother was the comedienne?”
“Yes. And we’ll broadcast these things forever. My son is taking over the station. Who knows how long these jokes will go out from the Copa and the Blue Angel in New York, Chez Paree in Chicago. Even the Concord.”
Cliff took a deep breath. “
The broadcasts I heard didn’t mention the comedienne’s real name. It wasn’t Selma, was it?”
“Of course. Her stage name was Sally Gruen, but she was Vernon McKeithen’s mother, Selma. Where you calling from, by the way?”
“Ohio. Not far from where Selma lives. I met her recently when I bought one of Vernon’s radios.”
“No. Can’t be the same lady. This one was born in 1917.”
“That’s her!”
Mr. Matsumoto became excited, his voice bounding up and down as he yelled in Japanese to someone else in the studio. “Is she still clear minded? You think she’s able to handle an interview? I’d love to speak with her on the phone. Maybe a couple long talks, if she’s up to it. We need programming for a VHF station we’re starting next year.”
“I think she could do it, but I can’t guarantee she’d want to.”
“You are her acquaintance. If you set it up for us, I’ll say who you are in the interview and talk about you a bit. How you met her. I’ll run it twice a year.”
“I don’t know.”
“You sure? I can make you famous.” Mr. Matsumoto said this as a joke, but Cliff got up out of his chair and turned in a circle.
—
He tried for several days to phone Selma McKeithen. The following Saturday he drove over to Blue Shaft and parked in front of the old house at ten in the morning. The grass needed cutting, and nothing about the place seemed to have changed, except more paint had peeled away from its weatherboard siding. No one came to the door when he knocked. Sitting in his car for a long time, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel, he grew so increasingly nervous that he decided to go around back, where he stood on a porch hung with rotting mops and rusty galvanized pails. Then he felt foolish. The woman was ninety-eight years old. Maybe she had passed away. A dispiriting thrill of loss trembled through him as he remembered what his own mother had told him when they were at a funeral for his great-aunt, that whenever an old person dies, a library burns down.
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