Top 25 "It" products of all time: #21 -- The CB radio
Filed under: Extracurriculars
One of my fondest childhood memories was our 1978 road trip from our home outside of Philadelphia to meet some friends of my parents in Taos, New Mexico. It was made all the more memorable by the CB radio that we kids insisted my dad purchase for the trip.This was the height of the CB craze. Two years earlier, the song "Convoy" had been a number one hit on both the pop and country charts. If you are old enough, you may remember when trucker slang like "breaker, breaker 1-9" and "rubber duck" was considered the height of coolness. The song was later made into a movie of the same name. Remember the 1970s were a funny (peculiar, not ha-ha) time.
Anyway, the trip was wonderful. We traveled through the south and hit New Orleans, where my dad told me to say "Hi" to the nice lady dancing in an open-door bar on Bourbon Street that I was way too young to enter. All the while we spoke with our "good buddies" who gave us recommendations of where to eat and offered use advice on how to avoid speed traps from the "smokies."
One thing I do remember clearly is that CBs were kind of the Internet of their era. They were not exactly a market place of ideas, more like a roadside fruit stand. Some of the truckers used to jabber on incoherently for what seemed to be hours. Only later did I realize that they probably were on speed.
The CB is one relic of the 1970s that deserves to be buried along with bell-bottom jeans and reruns of "Good Times." 10-4, good buddy.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
2-08-2009 @ 9:49AM
Train said...
I first got into CB radio in 1973. We had truckers in the family and I am one today for the heavy freight division of a large package company. CB's back then were huge, vacuum tube, power sucking monsters. It wasn't until probably 1978 that they started to get small. Everybody & anybody who could ramp up a electronic production line in the world started making CB's
GE, Motorola, Pioneer, I think even Sony might have made some.
What they actually did however is buy the guts & put their name on the case. There was one brand Xtal who used X-rated movie actresses(?) as spokesmodels!
Today the CB radio is mostly dead. Oh, some drivers use them & you can still go by truckstops and hear drivers bitching about this & that, horizontal highway hostesses pedaling their exciting evening entertainment selections and a host of other things.
Most of this is to the tune of an echo boxed, over modulated, over amped, radio that makes Gary Coopers' Pride Of The Yankees speech sound normal!
So for a quick throwback to the 1970's, head on over to your local truck-em up stop, grab a Cobra radio, throw up a quik stik
antenna and listen in. Oh & by the way, unless you are gay(nothing wrong with that) we don't use "Good Buddy" any longer unless you are lookin for homosexual relations!
Channel 19 is still the place to be!
We'll catch you on the flip flop, we gone bye-bye!
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