I grew up in Hollister, California, a small farm town about 100 miles south of San Francisco and 30 miles east of Monterey. It wasn't and still isn't on the way to anywhere else. You had to want to go to Hollister to get there.
Summers there were hot. Local farmers produced tomatoes, apricots, cherries, apples and walnuts. And let me tell you that there was no place cooler than the middle of a lush walnut orchard on a hot August day. My family owned a small cannery and packed fruit and vegetables around the clock from June through October.
There were not many entertainment options for teenagers back in the late 60s to early 70s. All of us worked during the day either in the fields or the cannery, and most of us played a little baseball in the afternoon. But once the sun set behind the Gabilan Range to the west, well, you had to make your own fun. We figured out how to do that.
One of the pillars of Friday and Saturday nights in the summer was the "road party." We'd all meet in town because the only way to effectively plan anything back then was in person. Phones were unreliable and the concept of emails, texts or social media platforms was something from a futuristic movie.
Once gathered, we would select one of dozens of backroads that dead-ended into some remote cattle pasture or hay field, back our cars and trucks (mine was a mustard yellow 1970 Ford Ranchero) into a semi-circle, open the doors and windows, and tune our radios to KFRC-AM, the most powerful Top 40 radio station coming out of San Francisco.
We'd talk, and laugh, and brag, and complain about our jobs and families and how we were all going to get out of this one-horse town "one of these days." Yes, there was beer involved. Almost exclusively Coors Banquet Beer in a can (the only variety Coors brewed then). But it was the tunes on the AM radio, the only kind of station we could pull in so far from the big city, that drew us altogether -- cowboys and townies, jocks and brains, boys and girls.
I've been reading news coverage about carmakers eliminating AM radios for a variety of reasons -- most consumers can stream AM stations now and AM signals conflict with the on- board computer systems of new cars, to name just two.
This strikes me as an incredibly bad idea. AM radio is still the top audio source in the U.S. with more than double the audience of streaming platforms. Moreover, as the National Association of Broadcasters points out, AM radio serves a vital role in the nation's emergency infrastructure. Just ask the residents of Lahaina where they got the most timely and accurate information about last month's firestorm. There's no doubt that many of them were in their cars, listening to AM radio emergency broadcasts as they fled the quickly moving inferno.
I understand that radio has changed over the decades. We don't gather around the radio to listen to Fibber McGee and Molly or FDR's "Fireside Chats" any more. But for tens of millions of Americans AM radio is an integral connection to their communities and a popular way to access news, sports and entertainment.
And for teenagers in Hollister and the thousands of farm towns across the country, AM radio is still very likely to be the uniting force of "road parties" on warm summer nights.
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