The GE FM/AM Electronic Digital Clock Radio 7-4612B has officially become the meme clock, the one everyone from my generation owned. When it crossed my social feed recently, most people mentioned the alarm sound or the plastic wood grain. But I had a different memory lane to dive down.
Everyone used these to wake up in the morning. Long before we had Alexa and smartphones by our beds, clock radios were essential. You didn’t dare go to sleep without setting that alarm. But mine had the opposite effect. It kept me up. At 14, I’d scan the AM dial late at night and discover all kinds of signals: music, conversations, whatever I might find. That’s how I stumbled into the world of Larry King and Art Bell. When you’re 14, you’re always looking to speed-run to adulthood, and talk radio felt sophisticated. Larry King’s “Open Phone America” segment was like public access TV on the radio, with people calling in to discuss the most random topics. Art Bell came on so late that his strange stories and crazy callers would carry me off to sleep. Sunday nights were special. AM 740 played old-time radio shows like The Whistler and Dragnet. I felt like I was part of some underground scene, listening to shows from the 1940s.
Reflecting back, I knew I wasn’t the target audience. It was truckers and night shift workers calling in, grown-ups with real lives and strange opinions. But I listened anyway, like I’d found a secret channel into the adult world.
The nostalgia hit hard enough that I grabbed one off eBay. Some things I’d forgotten, that I only remembered once I had the device back in my hand, finding myself scrolling through the same dial I did when I was 14, looking for a signal: the static, lightning crashing through the sound, signals fading in and out, the sleep timer so you could fall asleep listening. Now the world of audio entertainment is back, bigger than before, with podcasts. I was an early podcast adopter, and these days I still fall asleep to voices, usually some crazy murder stories from true crime shows. Same ritual, different decade. It turns out that this old clock radio was giving me a preview of how we’d all be consuming content 30 years later.
I found this 1990 episode of Larry King’s radio show where he interviews Joan Benny, Jack Benny’s daughter. You get the full experience. Live callers. Larry reading the ads himself. All of it.
https://archive.org/details/jbi-joan-benny-1990-12-05-larry-king-show
