Most of these same stations

. .
.
>> Did they have “Oldies” in the 40’s and 50’s? Did they listen to songs from
>> 1900 or the ’teens?

I’m almost but not quite old enough to tell you. When I listened to radio in the early ’50’s it was mostly to listen to kids’ drama shows like “Straight Arrow”, “Sky King”, and “Sergeant Preston of the Yukon (and his wonder dog Yukon King). Presented by Quaker Puffed Rice and Quaker Puffed Wheat, the breakfast cereals shot from guns k-k-pow! pow!” Radio stations weren’t as specialized then as they are now, and radio networks were more prominent, so you wouldn’t have had an oldies station anyway. More like TV before all the cable channels. And there hadn’t been records for so long anyway; records from the ’10’s weren’t nearly as good fidelity as in the ’50’s. Plus people didn’t have FM radios. It was all AM, even the classical music stations. But I think radio stations did play songs from 20 years before mixed in with the current ones, introduced e.g. “Here’s an old standard, ’Deep Purple.’”

Musical theatre was bigger, too. A big fraction of the songs on the radio would be from the latest musical, like “South Pacific”, “The Most Happy Fella”, “Pajama Game”, “Brigadoon”, “The King and I”, or “My Fair Lady.” How could I have forgotten! “The Music Man”.

And while we’re on this history, you gotta remember that in the early ’50’s there weren’t transistor radios. Radios were at least the size of retro toasters, and stayed plugged into the wall.

My family had a big radio in the living room with a record player in it. It was a monster wooden box (the size of a two-drawer file cabinet, maybe, but everything looked bigger when I was 6 or 8) with four pieces of wood in front of the speakers that swiveled out, two on each side, for volume controls and to conceal the speaker. The front was hinged at the bottom and could pull forward so you could get at the controls. At the bottom of the control panel was a wonderful green-glowing “magic eye” tube in which a segment of a circle would glow narrower or wider as you tuned the station in better. The turntable was on the top, with a hinged wooden cover. It was a classy turntable with an automatic record dropping spindle. Under the turntable, behind the radio proper, was storage for a collection of 78 RPM records. 33’s were coming in, too, and were of course much better because you didn’t have to turn over a stack of records every 15 minutes or so.

We had a good collection of London Full Frequency Range Recordings (the first attempts at hi-fi) of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. My parents would play them at night as we kids were falling asleep, and we would constantly be yelling downstairs “turn it up!” as our favorite songs started, or “turn it down” at the boring parts. What annoying kids! The best songs always seemed to be in act 2 and I would be asleep before I got to hear my favorites.

When I was in 5th grade a 6th grade girl (daughter of family friends, else would never have had anything to do with me) who was MUCH more grown up, as 6th grade girls are going to be compared to 5th grade boys, told me about this great new stuff, Rock ’n’ Roll.

When I thought about oldies, I thought first of old time movies. A highlight of kids TV shows in the ’50’s was the Old Time Movie segment, maybe Charlie Chaplin or Keystone Cops or Three Stooges. Since the TV’s were all B&W anyway the B&W movies weren’t as jarring as they are now.