Radio: San Antonio on the airwaves

In my previous blog I mentioned listening to Stu Paul (& Roy Acuff) do play-by-play broadcasts of the San Antonio Missions Texas League baseball games on radio station KKYX-AM 680. This "classic country music" station is one of two stations I've listened to THE MOST since arriving here in San Antonio in A.D. 2002. The other station is KDRY-AM 1100, which used to be a limited-broadcast (i.e., not 24-7) mixture of good Christian teaching programs and of Southern Gospel music. KDRY is now 24-7, but is also almost all-teaching and almost no music any more.

A-a-a-hhh! I remember how in '02 I got into a very satisfying M.O. to start my week days. I would set the alarm for 5:00 AM on radio (rather than set for the beeping alarm), and have the radio tuned to KDRY. At the appointed hour KDRY would awake me with its opening, which included the morning deejay, Ralph Thompson, saying, ". . .and remember: yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift from God. So let us rejoice and be glad in the present!" I've never heard a better opening for ANY radio station!

If I remember correctly, the first hour was all Southern Gospel music, and at some point during it I would silence the radio to do my morning devotions. Then, at 6:00, I would listen to Dr. John MacArthur's excellent teaching program "Grace to You". As soon as it ended, I would switch the radio to KKYX, catch the 3-4 minutes of local news, weather & traffic (not that I needed the latter), and then delight in two to three classic country music songs, one of which was ALWAYS a George Strait song! And then, about 6:38 would come "Today in History". Deejay Jerry King would go over events that had happened on the date thru'out the years (usually just the past century or two), and generally end this with a partial description of some event -- with the listener to call in a missing detail. I won a lot of tickets to such things as San Antonio Missions games and the Texas Folklife Festival by listening to Jerry's "Today in "History"!

Alas! most of that M.O. is now gone, mostly due to KDRY going 24-7 and dropping almost all music and that dear morning deejay! And at KKYX the program director, who dictates (doubtless by computer programming) what songs are played when (with NO concern for what the listening public might like), has seen fit to take George Strait and move him to BEFORE the 6:30 news (while "Grace to You" is still airing at KDRY). Oh, well. . . I still listen to KKYX a lot (& still win with "Today in History" or "Farm Fact or Fiction" an hour later), and to KDRY for "Grace to You" and when I can for its one remaining hour of So. Gospel music on Saturday afternoons.

Radio station KKYX-AM 680 played two songs on the morning of the eleventh of September, that were very appropriate for the solemn memorial of that fifth anniversary of the attacks. Right after "Today in History" it broadcast Alan Jackson's song "Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)?" which was most appropriate, I'd say! Within a half hour the station also broadcast Moe Bandy's "Americana". Even more than Jackson's song, "Americana" bro't tears to my eyes, as it always does.

"Americana" is a ballad sung in the first person, of a man who for some reason turns off a superhighway into a small county seat town -- I like to think Decatur, Texas, or Crossville, Tennessee -- and upon observing the relaxed and friendly pace of life there, decides to hang around a bit longer, even tho' it will "throw me off my schedule". He sings about old men playing checkers and kids hop-scotching on the town square, Old Glory flying "high above a statue of an unknown soldier" at the courthouse, and young lovers courting at the drug store's soda fountain "like we did before they built the shopping mall". And as he gets ready to pull back onto the superhighway "it hit me like a freight train, that a stone's throw from the fast lane, America is still safe and sound."

Yes, even that Norman Rockwell-like image of small-town Americana, is getting rarer and rarer. And I suppose that 9-11 has to some degree had its deleterious effect upon even the smallest and most remote of burgs in this country. This is probably true also for that earlier terrorist attack that so many seems to have forgotten, but which was perpetrated by red-blooded American citizens against a target in the Heartland: McVeigh & company's vile destruction of the Murrah Building in OK City.

Still, as I listened to Moe Bandy sing those words that are at once both nostalgic and patriotic, "it hit me like a freight train" that there are still strong remnants of that old pre-terrorist American life, to be experienced here & there. And so I'll continue to sing along on the chorus:

. "Americana, pictures of a people proud and free
. Americana, I’ll keep holding to the dream
. You’re still what living means to me."