Part I
When my public school introduced me to French, in 1960-something, I discovered a French-language broadcast from Montreal. Radio, then, was still mostly AM—Amplitude Modulated—and FM, Frequency Modulated, was in its commercial infancy; the radios in our house didn’t have it.
When FM did debut on the newer radios over the next four or five years, we learned that it could carry a wider range of sound with greater fidelity, which made it far more suitable for reproducing the richness of non-electrified music. Which meant “classical”. Which meant its audience would be much smaller than for pop music. Which led to radio broadcast in the public interest—National Public Radio. Which, being subsidized by public funds—taxes—had no advertising, and so because it was freed from endless shouting over chewing gum and the horrors of dandruff and bad breath, people of a certain disposition found it more attractive, and tuned in. But many folks of the disposition that turning a buck was what makes the world go around, being blocked from doing so on FM, despised and denounced this use of “their” taxes. “I’m paying for that,” one family member once said, about an amenity offered to workers of an electric company. I’d heard the phrase before; I’ve heard it since. I’ve heard it from people who I suspect of paying no tax at all. Legally or not.
A drawback of FM radio waves however was that they wouldn’t carry far. It was clearer, but I thought that had something to do with it being generally nearer, despite the fact that the closest radio station of all came with plenty of static. Certain inconsistencies were normal features of my life. Certain of them I couldn’t do anything about; I hadn’t the information or the power to weed them out. And of course sometimes I didn’t bother myself to be consistent or clear. That goes on to this day.
Overall I just had the impression that FM was “better quality.” On the other hand AM, given enough oomph—wattage—could carry hundreds of miles. Whenever you traveled, which in the USA meant by car, you could turn on your—AM—radio, and speed your tuning knob across its band at speeds that smushed its collective voices into a comic gibberish. from which you’d return at slower speed and pick some intelligible samples. In a minute you’d narrow down the candidates, and either pick one or turn the thing off for another hour. It was our training in becoming attention deficit, before the TV remote control leaped us far forward in that direction.
At night there were always more choices. Without the radiation that rides along with sunlight, AM became clearer and traveled much, much farther. I understood that AM bounced off the upper atmosphere (how does a thing “bounce off” something that get thinner and thinner?) and spread over great areas. I hitch-hiked in numerous cars and trucks east of the Mississippi tuned into the country music from Wheeling, West Virginia, hundreds of miles away.
I’ve been looking all these years for someone who could explain why these simple invisible energy waves could have such different properties. Now that I’m writing these words it finally comes to me, “Hey, that’s just got to be laid down somewhere online.” So I looked, and sure enough, it is.
I’ll read it when I’m done here.
Anyhow, as a male I guess, I’d already learned and practiced my wrist-twist on the radio knob, and exercised my way across the jittery AM spectrum. And that was how, in a darkness near midnight, as a high-school novice in French, I first heard <<Ici radio Canada>>. I pulled the radio close to my face and turned an ear, listening eagerly. In a few minutes the voices subsided into static, bobbing up and down like a drowning man. I tried another night, and another, but Radio Montréal stayed obscured somewhere at that general place on the dial—sometimes you could twiddle a little to one side or another and find your station; sometimes you had to twiddle back and forth if you wanted to stay tuned in. I’m still looking for the reason for that too.
On a few rare, golden occasions, for a few minutes, I got a clear voice. And damn, I could barely pick out a word—actually, I think I was getting a syllable that was part of a larger word. No matter how hard I perked my ears forward—I think it’s possible to strain a muscle of some kind in doing that—nothing was communicated from the speakers to me. The speech of a foreign language remained…foreign.
Well, I thought, I’ll get the hang of it, probably next year. But I didn’t. Radio Canada must have reduced its power, or maybe there was more interference between them and us, but I couldn’t locate it at all. All I heard of a foreign language was in the green-painted walls of school (and all schools seemed to sport the same olive green, as though the US Army had surplus shiploads of it from WWII).
I went on to take three more years of French in high school and another semester or two in college. The only times I heard someone other than my teachers or classmates speak was in language labs—and for some reason, although my high school had one, we only used it a few times in the years I was there. Spanish classes, German classes, Italian classes—was Latin still offered?—weren’t using it either. That sorta expressed my public school experience in a nutshell: You can look but you can’t touch.
But I persisted. I found some pocket-sized books in French while rummaging in a used book store; I took a half-dozen home. I added others one by one, and in due time—when I got into my thirties, was paying my own car insurance (one of the watersheds in my protracted maturation)—I started taking them out and reading.
(to be continued)
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