I think one of the happiest times of my teenage years were the years my family was involved in Citizen's Band Radio, or CB for short. I got involved in it in 1974 when a good friend of mine, Bobby Sanderford, installed one in his car and I heard him talking on it. His CB name - or 'handle' as it's called ' was "Ace High." I thought that was just the coolest thing ever, and as soon as I could make it happen I got one for myself.
My first CB radio was a Royce 23 channel 5 watt mobile radio, and I mounted it under the dashboard on the left side of the steering wheel of my mother's 1973 Ford Pinto. At that time in my life I was planning on joining the Navy when I graduated from high school, so of course my CB handle became "Navy Man." My father was quickly bitten by the CB bug, as was just about everyone else in my family except for my sister Cindy. CB was never her thing, and I don't think she's ever talked on it. But that didn't stop the rest of us from getting involved in it, and my father went at it just like everything else he did - whole hog. It didn't take long before my father had one in his car and we had a base station sitting on the counter in the kitchen, complete with a tunable radio, a D104 microphone, a 500 watt ABC tunable linear amplifier, and an external speaker hooked up to a 4 element "Moon Raker" directional antennae 200 feet up in the air in top of a pine tree in our back yard. And just for good measure, Pop hooked up a police scanner as well. Here's what the setup looked like:
As you can see from the placard, our call letters were KHW-2767. My father's handle was "Raleigh Golfer," my mother was "Little Orphan Annie," and I was "Navy Man." My sister Dorothy was in college at this time so she wasn't around except for during the summer, so Pop didn't put her handle on the placard when he made it. Her handle was "Dewdrop," and my father hung the handle of "Nuisance" on my sister Cindy.
I very vividly remember sitting up until all hours of the morning with my father on the weekends "talking skip;" that is, using the cloud cover to bounce the radio signal around and talk to operators in other countries. Talking skip was illegal as hell, but we did it anyway. The laws governing CB radio at that time mandated a 5 watt output limit on radios, but we had that 500 watt tunable amplifier anyway. And let me tell you, when that thing was cranked up at 2AM so as not to interfere with anyone's TV (that went off the air at midnight anyway), we we talked, EVERYBODY listened! Our signal was so strong that it would bleed over three channels in both directions, meaning that if we were talking on channel 15 you hears us all the way down to 12 and all the way up to 18! We had the "walkin'est, talkin'est" base station in the city of Raleigh, no doubt about it!
The rules in CB radio at that time were simple. First, you had to have a license. This was a one-time purchase of $20, so that was no big deal. As I mentioned before, power output was limited to 5 watts, which gave you about a two or three mile range (unless you had a linear amplifier installed in your car under the seat). Channels 1-8 were reserved for businesses, channel 9 was the emergency channel, and channels 10-23 were the "hobby" channels. Channel 19 was the trucker's channel, so you didn't talk on it unless you were traveling. And you absolutely didn't talk on channel 9 unless you had an emergency. There was even an organization called R.E.A.C.T. (which stood for Radio Emergency Action Communication Team) made up of volunteers that did nothing but listen to channel 9 for emergencies and then notify the authorities as needed. When you were talking on the radio you were allowed to talk for 5 minutes ("getting your nickel's worth") and then you had to shut up for 5 minutes to let others talk if need be. There was hardly ever any need for this, however, because CB wasn't so popular as to be THAT crowded. Usually you could talk for as long as you wanted, especially early in the mornings.
Every city had its own 'monitor channel,' the channel that was set aside for people to contact other CBers on, and the monitor channel for Raleigh was Channel 11. The way it worked was simple - if I wanted to see if "Ace High" was on the air, I'd go to the monitor channel and call for him. If he answered, we would immediately go to another channel to talk, leaving the monitor channel free. If you got to that channel and found someone talking on it already, when one of the people stopped talking you'd key up your microphone and say "BREAK," then wait for a reply. When the other guy said, "Go ahead, break," you'd tell the person you wanted to talk with to go to another channel. It was courtesy to do it this way, and courtesy traveled in both directions - you didn't talk after you asked for a break until you were given permission, and if someone asked for a break you gave it to them immediately.
And then there were the 10 codes to learn. There weren't that many so they were fairly easy. 10-4 was 'ok,' 10-9 was 'repeat,' 10-20 was 'location,' and 10-36 was 'time check.' I'm sure there were more, but these were the only ones used on a regular basis.
I met some really nice people through the CB radio, and everyone involved had a ball. I enjoyed it so much that when I got my own car after I joined the Air Force I put a CB radio in it, changing my handle to "Blue Knight." CB radio was a lot of fun, something that we all looked forward to doing, especially on the weekends when you'd have 4 or 5 people talking on the same channel, having a blast and just enjoying the experience.
And then that damned movie came out.
Don't get me wrong, I love "Smokey and The Bandit," and it's one of my favorite movies, but the truth is that the movie absolutely ruined CB radio. Once that damned movie came out, for Christmas of 1977 every kid in the nation wanted either a CB radio or a Pontiac Trans Am for Christmas. And since most parents couldn't afford the car, they got their kid a CB radio instead.
The result was that the radio was flooded with kids who had no idea how to talk on the radio. You name it, they did it wrong. They talked on the monitor channel. They talked on the trucker's channel. They talked on the business channels. They even talked on Channel 9. And it became impossible to have a conversation for longer than 2 minutes without this happening:
Me: "So I'll meet you at the KK at nine o'clock, then?" (The KK was the Krispy Kreme donut shop at the corner of Person and Peace Streets in Raleigh, a CB hangout.)
Kid: "BREAK!"
Me: "Stand by, Ace High; go ahead, break."
Kid: "What's your 20?"
OR
Kid: "How about a 10-36?"
After a while, my reply to those questions became either "IF I WAS UP YOUR ASS YOU'D KNOW WHERE I WAS!" or "TIME FOR YOU TO BUY A FUCKIN' WATCH!"
There were so many requests for licenses that the FCC couldn't keep up with them. What used to take 30 days to process was now taking 90 days or longer, so you were told to use the letter "K" and your initials followed by your zip code as a temporary license until yours arrived. And even then they had to add a letter to the license because they were issuing so many. (My license was KBLK-9720.) Then they dropped the fee down to $5, then eliminated the need for a license entirely. Soon after that they increased the number of channels from 23 all the way up to 40, and that still wasn't enough. All of the channels were flooded with kids breaking into your conversation and asking for time or location checks.
I put up with this nonsense for about six months, then said the hell with it. When I sold my car in '78 I took the CB radio out of it and didn't install it in the next car. I didn't have a CB radio in my car again until the early '90s; by that time things had calmed down, but the CB radio experience was never the same again. The fellowship and camaraderie was gone, never to return; not even the truckers were talking as much as they used to. I had a CB in my car until 2000, and when I sold that car I took the radio out and never installed it again. CB radio had just stopped being fun.
All because of that damned movie.
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