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A Columbia County Boy's Recollections and Memories of Columbia County Florida (2012) Lenvil H. Dicks

HEARING THE RADIO

In the 30’s, no one who lived out in the country had any electricity, but there began to be a few battery
radios owned by some of the farmers, and my uncle Ollie Dicks had the first battery operated radio that I
ever remember listening to. The whole neighborhood would go down to his house on Saturday nights,
and sit around on his front porch and listen to the Grand Old Opry on the radio. That is where I first
recall hearing Chubby Wise play.

The antenna system which my uncle Ollie had rigged up was quite novel and interesting. He had gone
down into a cypress swamp and cut two real small cypress trees, but which were long and tall and
straight. He brought two of those poles to his house and buried the big end on the dirt, and let the small
end stick up 35 or 40 feet in the air. He then attached a clothes line from one of those cypress poles to
the other and hooked the wire from the antenna connection on his radio to that clothes line. He got
excellent reception, and you could hear that radio all over the place. That was something we all looked
forward to doing on Saturday nights occasionally, and there was not a Saturday night when there was
not a pretty good gathering of people down at uncle Ollie’s house to listen to the radio. It was not just
Chubby Wise, but the very fact that you could sit on the front porch at his house and hear performances
which were being given hundreds of miles away. That blew everybody’s mind.

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