'The bright good morning voice, who's heard but never seen...' - 'Radio Daze': ep:1

Debuting a new series: 50 years on both sides of the microphone, in-studio and afield throughout my childhood, professional career, and so-called "retirement."

"In the old days, you went to AM for the jangly impromptu daily conversation. Local ads and network news at the top of the hour. Now, we prefer Spotify and podcasts,” columnist James Lileks mused in a 2023 column in the Minnesota Star Tribune.

“The end of AM in cars is the end of a 90-year-old tradition. Car radios become popular in the early '30s, and they cost $39. Adjusted for inflation, that's over $9,000 today. Eventually, they were integrated into the dashboard and became quite stylish. Push-button control for Jet Age motorists.

“I remember squinting at the dial in our Mercury, wondering what those little triangles meant. Good thing no one told me. The answer was COMMUNIST HELLFIRE. In case of nuclear attack, you were supposed to turn your radio to the special marks (640 and 1240, if you're curious), where you'd receive instructions, like go to your basement. Thanks! Never would've thought of that." he noted.

That last paragraph is painfully ironic: nowadays, a red triangle refers not to a superpower nuclear war, but to pro-Hamas posters signifying, both Israeli and Jewish targets abroad—and the bomb shelters across Israel, there to protect her almost 10 million citizens from rockets and other aerial munitions sent by Iran and it’s “Ring-of-Fire” terror proxies:

At any rate, Lileks’ folksy recollections prompted me to take a look in my own rearview mirror at where I’ve been in radio, and, and ahead via the windshield-mounted radar to see where the online “new media” highway leads. In this series, I’ll tune in to stations along the way, and share some of the highlights—or, as we used to call them at NPR, “driveway moments.”

I’ve been behind the mic and in the editing suite for several decades: as a voice talent for international and local clients; editing and producing Associated Press award-winning international, statewide, and local news radio out of Atlanta, GA, and Jerusalem; and started off as a cross-genre program host and disc jockey in both the US and Israel.

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The late songwriter, Harry Chapin, on his 1974 Short Stories album, in his poignant “W*O*L*D*,” depicted a sad life of professional struggle and faded relationships as his radio DJ character left his woman to work his way through lower-tier stations and announcing gigs across America.

“Hello honey, it's me / What did you think when you heard me back on the radio?” his wandering radio character began, in a bittersweet call to his ex.

His lyrics certainly get me where I live; I’ve scribbled a few of my own verses of joy and tribulation during my radio and newsgathering career—on both sides of the microphone; on home and car radios, in both America and Israel.

Not long ago, I was listening to Gil Scott Heron's classic "Winter in America" and eponymous album, an audio eulogy for a nation he and his acolytes of scorn saw as an irredeemably racist, rapacious, and tyrannically militarist, one they thought was tottering on its last moral legs.

The first time I heard it was in the mid-70s when I played it as a budding radio broadcaster at KPFT 90.1, a Quaker-founded, Pacifica network station in Houston, (their unspoken motto: "Peace, love, ecology, and, oh, yeah: death to the running dog capitalist pigs, man!"). I broke my teeth there as an early morning/late night blues DJ, Jewish affairs pseudo-maven, “No Nukes”- era environmental show host, and sat in as an occasional afternoon drive-time host for National Public Radio’s then-nascent and edgy All Things Considered news and current affairs slot.

Ironically enough, I was infatuated by the station’s offbeat, counterculture mentality while also fully employed in my day gig: gray-collar electronics assembly at various Gulf Coast "oilpatch" (oil industry)  industries on the other side of town. Talk about “respecting alternative lifestyles.” I never understood why my factory workbench welder and wiring harness colleagues gave me the side-eye when I glibly suggested they tune in to my three shows: "Blues at Sunrise" music tracks, "Embrace The Earth" tree-huggery, and a Jewish affairs program wryly entitled, "What's Nu?"

As the Brits might put it:“…you’re too clever by half.”

But - Jewishly assimilated, utterly secular, and observantly dumb as rocks - I was mostly just there for the radio experience and thrills of actually being on the other side of the radio speaker (I’d no doubt cringe to hear an aircheck from back in the day - and they’d, in turn, no doubt be apoplectic at the now wildly hostile anti-Israel mouthpiece to hear what’s become of me).

“So I drifted on down to Tulsa, Oklahoma to do me a late-night talk show / Now I've worked my way down home again, via Boise, Idaho / That's how this business goes.”

And - when I was sensible and non-stoned enough to cogitate together passing notions about it at all - was just sweetly naive enough to believe that the other broadcasters and the station philosophy were also merely hoping for a "kinder, gentler," non-Bush version of America. Or so I thought. More on this further down.

“Remember how we listened to the radio / And I said 'that's the place to be…”

Growing up in the then-sleepy small town of New Port Richey, Florida, I became an avid listener to WGUL. Now part of the Salem conservative Christian media group, back in the day it was just local talk, news, and weather, as far as I can recall.

Early mornings, before heading off to elementary school, I'd drink in the small-town hominess and familiarity of the airwaves, announcers, and commercials like a warm cup of hot chocolate on a chilly winter morning. I so wanted to be on the other side of the mic and naively fantasized about what it was like working at a radio station.

Late at night, in my darkened bedroom I’d pull my AM/FM clock radio under my blanket and slowly twirl the dial, picking up DJs from distant stations across much of America's heartland, scattered with ads, news, crop reports, and local sports scores.

Station signals faded in and out due to the vagaries of the signal bouncing off the ionosphere, which only made the experience of communication and contact with distant, unknown points on the map even more irresistible. A great visual example of this is the scene in one of my fave films, the 1997 sci-fi hit, Contact, in which the budding scientist, Ellie Arroway, connects with another shortwave radio enthusiast, in far-off Florida.

Later on, after graduating high school in Houston in 1976, as noted above, I was attracted to the—then unbeknownst to me—hard-left broadcasting bastion.

It was an amazingly hip place, located in a funky, aging, three-story wooden mansion, set along a quiet, tree-lined lane, dubbed, “radio station row,” shared with several other commercial radio outfits.

Although I was a devoted, practically full-time volunteer, the hardcore counterculture politics went mostly right over my head, well, until it became public knowledge that I was making aliyah, ie: emigrating from the US to resettle in Israel.

I never even paid much attention when KPFT regulars always seemed to spell it "AmeriKKKa." And since I was a non-performing, non-Israel-related Jew, I had no concept of just how militant they were against Israel and actively professing and behaving Jews. Until, one day between shows, I mentioned my still-secret plans to make aliyah and immigrate to Israel, with the assistant station manager.

The mere mention of the words "…moving to Israel," froze his curious glance over my shoulder, and he withdrew in cold contempt.

As I sat, hunched over, tensely filling out official forms for the move in an otherwise empty production office, it felt like he’d twisted the window-mounted AC unit knob to 10. The big chill didn't end with him, and I soon found myself excluded from much of the on-and-off—air bonhomie.

They already knew that I paid my rent and groceries off of environmentally demonized oil field industries, so choosing to tie my fate and future to the Jewish State, likely slotted right in with their sneering disdain.

Seems I was "canceled" decades before the term entered the cultural lexicon.

Looking back on that swerve around a pothole in my budding radio career, I can now only marvel about how long and deep the venom towards actively Zionist Jews in the US has run—and that, only now, post-Oct. 7th, am I—and so many Jews abroad, realizing and internalizing the seismic shift in our personal and public lives.

“But you can travel on ten thousand miles and still stay where you are…”

The poisonous surge in Islamic and politically fueled Jew hatred on both the Left and Right—so long denied, derided, and dismissed—brings me back to Scott-Heron: today, Nov. 5th—election day—watching the increasingly heralded implosion of my beloved birthland, I darkly realized that his words were, indeed, coming true—but the protagonists—shockingly, are on the Left, including the Antifa domestic terrorists, older, monied Boomer limousine liberals, and in recent decades, a melange of Islamic supremacists, now roving the Halls of Congress, State Department, academia, media and "advising" both the POTUS, and the possible POTUS-in-waiting.

You know - I need to get this out there: I'm really—but really—not an ideological "right-winger," as such, neither here nor in the States, and have voted Republican and Democrat there, and Labor, Likud, etc - and pretty much across the politico/social spectrum - here. "Curmudgicrat," maybe? Call me a pragmatic, non-ideological centrist, I suppose.

But—between working in the media for so long on both continents (including NPR affiliates in the States, and BBC - network stations while in Israel), and seeing what can only be called by now the intentionally engineered decline of America—if I seem to be of the “Right,” it’s because I’ve worked for so long around the “Left.”

I’ll admit that I struggle to keep a moral, intellectual, and practical equilibrium against the hyper-polarized “Rethugilican—Democrap” lunacy engulfing the US—but I’m trying. One stop along the way was with this movement:

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In upcoming episodes, I’ll share glimpses of my NPR-era radio features like the one below on Evangelical Christian support for Israel:

…and other events and scenes during my US radio days, including covering the first Obama presidential election, “Tea Party” movement rallies, and fun stuff like this:

“Batman And The Jetsons Do Lunch”

Other stops along the route will include guerilla “micro-broadcaster” RadioWest in Jerusalem, covering 9/11 and terror attacks live for JPost Radio, working as a reporter and editor for China’s official Xinhua News Agency—at the same time I was submitting articles with the arch-right Breitbart News outlet (I’m not kidding…)—and Zoomcasting the “Iron Swords War”—often while under rocket fire in northern Israel:

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Warm regards,
David Bender