"Raleigh Golfer," "Little Orphan Annie," "Navy Man," and The Golden Age of CB Radio

Got a text message from an old service buddy of mine last night inquiring as to when I was going to post something on my blog again, since it had been more than a month since I'd done so. I told him part of the truth, that part being that I've been so busy lately with work and all that I just haven't had the chance. The other part that I didn't tell him was because ever since I became a Freemason I've tried to change my outlook on things and have been hesitant to post something here because I was finding it hard to write about something of a positive nature. With the disastrous road our country is headed down under the non-leadership of the Buffoon In Chief and the goings-on in the Middle East that are about to make their way to our shores thanks to his indecision and total lack of leadership, it was tough to find something to write about that wasn't going to be me bitching about it all.

And then, thanks to a Facebook post today, I found it - the perfect thing, and as I'm quite sure you're aware of by now I'm talking about the Citizen's Band Radio, or CB for short.

I got into CB radio in the summer of 1973 thanks to a friend of mine from high school, Bobby Sanderford. Bobby was the coolest guy I knew, and one day he showed up in his '68 Olds SS with a CB radio mounted in it. He showed me how it worked, explaining the rules of the road to me: there were 23 channels but you could only talk on the first 11. The "upper channels" were reserved for business use, with the first 11 being designated as the "hobby channels." Channel 9 was the Emergency Channel, and you didn't talk on that channel unless you were reporting an emergency. There was even a volunteer organization called R.E.A.C.T. (Radio Emergency Associated Communications Team) that monitored Channel 9 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Channel 19 was the trucker's channel that all of the long-distance truck drivers used when travelling. That left a total of 10 channels that you could talk on, and in those days that was more than enough.

You had to have a license from the FCC to talk on the CB radio, although you didn't need the license to buy one. The license was $20 and was good for one base station and up to five mobile units, and was renewable every year. Talk time was limited to 5 minutes ("getting your nickel's worth") at a time, then you had to pause for 5 minutes to let others talk before you started up again. This rule was widely ignored because there was no need for it - there was plenty of space on all of the channels, so you could sit on a channel and talk for as long as you wanted and nobody cared.

The FCC was known as "The Candy Man," and the legends of the solid color van with the circular tracking antennae on top prowling around Raleigh looking for over-powered base stations were many. CB radios were limited by Federal law at an output of 5 watts, but just about everyone ran a linear amplifier, my family included. Once I got the CB bug I transmitted it to my parents and my sisters, and in typical style my father got us into it in a big, big way. My father has never done anything half-assed; his philosophy has always been, "If I'm going to do something I'm going to do it right!" and I can't disagree with that. I adopted the same philosophy and have lived by it my whole life, and it's served me well. Anywho, once the CB bug bit him it wasn't long before we had a mobile radio in his business car to use while he was on the road, a mobile in my mother's car for my mom and I to use, and a base station in the kitchen. The base station was hooked up to a 4 element Moonraker Directional antenna that was 75 feet up in the air in the top of a pine tree in our back yard, and after my father won an ABC 500 watt tunable linear amplifier from another CB'er known as "Red Bug" in a poker game and installed it into the base station setup, when we keyed up EVERYONE listened. Any TV within five miles of us that were in line with the direction the antennae was pointing heard us talking, and our "bleed over" could be heard two channels on either side of the one we were talking on. For those reasons we made it a rule not to fire up the ABC until really late at night, and I remember my father staying up until 2 or 3 AM talking to CB'ers in Guam or however far away he could bounce his signal off of the clouds. That was called "skip" and was illegal as hell, another reason we did it late at night.

When we set the mobile unit up in my mom's car we put two coaxial 108" white fiberglass whip antennas on either end of the back bumper instead of the short, trunk-lid mounted antenna my father used. CB radio antennas are directional, and if you had two of them on the back instead of just one you could both hear better and talk further. Since my mom's car was a white over butterscotch 1973 Ford Pinto, it made quite a impression rolling down the road with those two huge whip antennas swaying in the breeze. I jokingly called it the "fishing trawler," and the car became widely known around the Raleigh CB circles.

One of the things that Bobby told me was that you didn't use your real name on the CB radio; Federal law prohibited it, for some unknown reason. So everyone who talked on the CB had a nickname, known as a "handle," and the challenge was finding a "handle" that both applied to you and wasn't already in use by someone else. My father picked "Raleigh Golfer" since he was an avid golfer, and my mom picked "Little Orphan Annie" because that was her favorite cartoon character when she was growing up; my sister Dorothy was "Dewdrop," my sister Cindy was "Nuisance" (hung on her by my father and not very popular with her), and I picked "Navy Man" since at that point in my life I was planning on joining the Navy when I got out of high school. Bobby was "Ace High," and he was always the first person I called for when I got on the radio.

We applied for our license about the same time we started setting up our gear, and when it came my father framed it and hung it on the wall in the kitchen over the radio. Our license was KHW-2767, and the law required that you use it whenever you got on the air and called for another person. You were supposed to state the call letters of the person you were trying to reach twice followed by your call letters, and the person you were looking for was to acknowledge by stating your call letters followed by "Go ahead." Of course, most of the time you just keyed up and said, "How 'bout it, Ace High, you got your ears on?" and if he did, he'd answer back. We used the call letters every now and then, but not much. No one did, really. Every city has its own "monitor channel," the one channel that everyone listened to but didn't talk on; this was where you went when you wanted to see if a friend was on the air. In Raleigh it was Channel 11, so if I wanted to see if "Ace High" was on the air I'd go to Channel 11, key up and say, "How 'bout it, Ace High, got your ears on?" and wait for a reply. If he replied we'd immediately move to another channel to talk, leaving the monitor channel open for others to use for the same purpose. If you wanted to bring down the wrath of the CB Gods upon your head, all you had to do was get on the monitor channel and start beating your gums. You'd get about a dozen guys that would call you out right away, telling you in no uncertain terms that you don't talk on the monitor channel - all without cursing, because that was illegal and we didn't do it. Period.

We took to CB radio like a duck to water - at least, me and my parents did. Dorothy and Cindy weren't all that interested in it, but for the rest of us it was a daily thing. In the last part of my junior year and all of my senior year in high school I was a school bus driver, and I'd sit at the radio in the afternoons around five o'clock and wait for my mom to call me on the radio to tell me she was on the way home. When she did that I'd leave the house, get in my school bus that was parked in front of my house, and drive it to the elementary school a mile or so away to park it for the night. She'd meet me there and take me home, all thanks to the CB radio. Late at night on the weekends my father was always talking to someone on the CB; people with handles like "Dirty Bird," "Baker Charlie," "Red Bug," "Green Bug," "Little Daddy," "No Name," and "Wire Wheel" all became a close circle of friends.

As for me, the Pinto was pretty much mine at night and on the weekends, so I was always out and about. I did a lot of running around Raleigh, meeting up with other CB buddies at various locations around town, but the one location that always comes to mind and brings a smile to my face whenever I think of our CB radio days was the "KK," or the "Double K" as some called it.

The "KK" was the Krispy Kreme Donut Shop at the corner of Person and Peace Streets in Raleigh. That intersection is a "T" type intersection, with the "KK" being on one corner of the intersection and an old, deserted gas station being on the other corner. This was the local hangout for all of the CB'ers in Raleigh, and since the parking lot of the "KK" was kinda small we'd all park over in the gas station. On any given Friday or Saturday night there'd be anywhere from two to a dozen "mobiles" parked in the gas station, and someone always had the radio on, the PA speaker engaged, and the microphone hanging out of the window. That way if you heard someone calling for you on the monitor channel while you were standing outside of your car talking, you just walked over to whatever car had the PA on and the mike hanging out, picked it up, and answered the call. The cops pretty much left us alone because they knew we weren't there to cause trouble, and the fact that "Wire Wheel" was also a Raleigh city cop helped. Bobby and I were on the same company softball team (although neither one of us worked for the company), so a lot of times we'd break out the gloves and ball and toss it back and forth, listening to the AM radio and pausing when someone called for us on the CB just long enough to answer it. Either that or we'd sit around talking, drinking Cokes and eating donuts, just having a good ol' time and enjoying life.

That was the summer of 1974, and it was easily one of the two best summers of my life. Whenever I think of my days in Raleigh I invariably think of the CB radio, all of the friends we made, and all of the good times we had. (We won't talk about the deep-sea fishing trip we went on, the one where I discovered I get seasick and caused me to seriously reconsider my life's choice for military service.) Once I enlisted in the Air Force I changed my handle to "Blue Knight" since I became a Law Enforcement Specialist, and would attend the meetings at the "KK" every weekend that I was home and not out on a date - and sometimes I took my girlfriend with me. Thanks to the CB radio and the circle of friends we had made because of it, the good times seemed like they were going to go on forever.

And then that damned movie came out and ruined everything.

If you're a CB'er from that era you know exactly which movie I'm talking about without my even having to mention the title. For those of you who aren't from that era, the movie of which I'm speaking - the one that ruined the CB radio forever - was "Smokey and the Bandit."

After that damned movie came out the two things that every pre-teen or teenage boy wanted (besides Sally Field) was either a Pontiac Trans Am or a CB radio. And since Trans Ams were too expensive, guess what everyone got - yep, CB radios. That was THE Christmas gift of the year for 1977, and on that day the CB radio that I knew and loved vanished forever.

There were so many people talking on all of the channels that you couldn't get a word in edgeways to ask for a break. The monitor channel became non-existent as people who had no Godly idea how to conduct themselves on a CB radio began yapping about anything and everything, and 90% of them were kids. And I don't mean teenagers, I mean 10 or 11 year old kids. And they'd all do the exact same thing, every single mother-loving one of them, and it was irritating as hell. You'd be having a conversation with a friend and some kid would say "Break!" in between transmissions, and being the courteous person that you are you'd reply, "Go ahead, break," and let the kid find out if who he wanted to talk to was listening. After all, that was the way it went. Until that damned movie, anyway; after that, it went like this:

"Break!"

"Go ahead, break."

"What's your 10-20?"

Either that, or this:

"Break!"

"Go ahead, break."

"How about a 10-36?"

For those of you who don't know, a 10-20 is your location and a 10-36 is a time check. This was the kid's way of starting a conversation, by interrupting yours to ask for your location or a time check. After a very short while my replies were always, "None of your business!" and "Time for you to buy a watch!"

The channels got so crowded that the FCC turned the upper channels loose for "hobby" use, and shortly after that authorized an additional 17 channels to bring the total number of channels up to 40. Channel 9 even got crowded with kids asking for time checks, and the folks at R.E.A.C.T. just about had a cow. Demand for licenses was so heavy that the FCC passed a rule that until yours showed up you could use the letter "K" followed by your three initials and your ZIP code; shortly after that FCC expanded the call letters from three letters and four numbers to four letters and four numbers, dropping the fee down to a buck. And shortly after that, when the Feds realized that they couldn't keep up with the demand and had no way of enforcing the laws on the legions of "squeakers" yakking without a license, they dropped the requirement for a license altogether.

I was sorely tempted to abandon the CB radio entirely, but I hung in there. The fad took about 18 months or so to wear off, but by that time most of the people I knew from the good old days were gone, driven off by the "squeakers" of the "Smokey and the Bandit" craze. When things finally did calm down it was like a vast wasteland on all 40 channels - no one talking anywhere, at any time. The times that I enjoyed when I first got into CB radio were gone forever. I kept a CB radio in my car until 2001, using it mainly on the highways to talk to truckers while I was travelling and to the few CB friends I had at the bases where I was stationed. When I traded cars in 2001 I didn't transfer the radio to the new car, and it's been that way ever since. The bite of the bug finally wore off.

But I still think of those days, the days of the CB radio of the early '70s and the nights at the "KK," tossing softball with "Ace High" in the gas station parking lot, listening to my father talking "skip" at 1 AM, and turning the dial on the Moonraker to get it adjusted to just the right angle so I could talk to the guy in West Virginia. But most of all I think of the gatherings at the "KK," and I suppose every time I think of the CB radio I'll think of that little slice of CB heaven in Raleigh, North Carolina.

And I'll smile every time.

Keep the shiny side up and the greasy side down, good buddy, I'm 10-10 on the side.

IHC