Mom & Dad, having noticed that I was getting dangerous with my radio experiments, decided at some point to let me have the old Zenith five-tuber that had sat on the kitchen counter for as long as I could remember. And like all things that my parents gave me, I immediately took a screwdriver & pliers to it & look to see what it was that made it work.
    I added a loop of wire to the large loop glued to the cardboard on the back of the radio & began listening to stations far away. Places like Chicago and Nashville for starters, but later I could tune in low-power daytimer stations like WOSU, run by The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio & stations on the other side of either border. The easy ones were the powerhouse Mexican stations like XERH and XERW, or the closer Canadian Broadcasting Company stations in Toronto, Ottawa or, one rare nights, in Montreal and Quebec.
    I had by this time discovered other languages as well, which led to my trying to con my parents into buying me a shortwave radio by which I hoped to hear Norwegian or Spanish . . . which leads to the next page.