WLT A Radio Romance Author:Garrison Keillor "Oh the days when radio was new, Wilmer. It was so beautiful. When Wingo Beals and the Shoe Shine Boys played "Pat Him on the Popo" and the Norwegian Nightingale sang to hsi Tina and Leo told the one about the bed with a canopy. Back then, the WLT signal was received all the way to the Alleghenies and west to the Rockies. We amounted to some... more »thing. Radio spanned the continent, and radios were built to pull in signals from far away. The Zenith had a tuning knob as big as a grapefruit. You'd spin that and bring in Nashville and Cincinnati and Detroit and Little Rock and Salt Lake City and Pittsburgh. These little dinky plastic pisspot radios you buy today won't get a signal from thirty miles away and why should they? The shows sound the same everywhere you go. The radio is filled with twenty-four hours of orange peels, cigarette butts, and coffee grounds, and it sells the beer. Wilmer, but gosh, what a comedown. All the shows are gone that let people sing on the radio who were normal. Those shows were chewed up and digested and shat out by big money, and now all you get is nasty songs by savage young capitalists. Radio used to be a dream and now it's a jukebox. It's as if planes stopped flying and sat on the runway showing travelogues. But of course if you climb on your high horse nad talk about radio when it amounted to something, people mark you down as an old fart. So let's get out of here, Wilmer. Back to the barn. Radio is gone and it's time we went with it. All good things must come to an end, and here it is, the end."« less