I-55, Matthews, Mo., 7:17 p.m.
The sun has been down for almost an hour, and sure enough,
as the game begins, with the Cardinals broadcasters John
Rooney and Mike Shannon calling the first pitch, from Lance
Lynn to Jacoby Ellsbury, the reception is improving,
significantly so. The D layer has apparently begun its
nightly disappearing act, allowing the E layer to do its
magic and send the signal to my Chrysler 200 radio. But the
car is still in Missouri. It ought to get a St. Louis
station.
KMOX was first granted a license by the Federal
Communications Commission in 1925, according to the current
director of programming, Steve Moore, and called itself the
Voice of St. Louis. The F.C.C. soon permitted KMOX to use a
50,000-watt transmitter to send the signal in all
directions, and it protected the station by limiting the
power and direction of subsequent stations broadcasting on
the same frequency.
That allowed KMOX's signal, like other regional stations
around the country, to dominate huge areas of the
continental United States. It broadcasts at 1120, meaning it
sends out 1,120,000 cycles per second of electromagnetic
energy.
Jake Meyer, a 73-year-old lawyer in St. Marys, Pa., said he
was able to follow the Cardinals as a boy despite living 713
miles from the KMOX transmitter. In the early 1950s, he sat
with one hand on a wire in the radio and the other on a
radiator to create the best reception, while simultaneously
inducing fear in his mother, who thought he would be
electrocuted. Sometimes, he would drive up a nearby hill for
better reception, even taking a date on one occasion.
"Instead of making out, we listened to Jack Buck and Harry
Caray doing the Cardinals game," Meyer said.
Today there are more stations, more structures and more
interference, and Meyer says he has trouble getting the
station.
But Joe Buck said that when he was going to college at
Indiana University in Bloomington, he could get the games
all the way there, and when he drove home on vacations, the
reception steadily improved as he neared St. Louis.
"It was like a beacon calling me home," he said. "My dad
once showed me a letter he received from a missionary who
said he once heard the game in Tanzania. There were certain
nights when the atmosphere was right that the KMOX signal
would bounce all the way over there, and he could listen to
the Cardinals game sitting in Tanzania."
Joe Geerling, the chief engineer at KMOX, said that many
factors could affect an AM signal, including the weather.
The best conditions are cold, dry nights when people on the
other side of the globe might receive the signal, however
briefly. Through QSL card correspondence, distant radio
reception was confirmed.
"I've gotten cards from people in Guam and Holland who said
they heard a certain commercial at a certain time," Geerling
said. "Those are unusual. But yesterday, I got an email from
someone in Baton Rouge, and that's not unusual at all."
I-55, Blytheville, Ark.
Crossing the border into Arkansas, the roadway deteriorates
into a series of bone-rattling bumps. But the KMOX reception
is improving considerably in this rural area, as are the
conditions for the Red Sox, who even the score, 1-1,
according to Rooney and Shannon.
Finding a diner or a bar where some Cardinals fans might be
found in Blytheville, 227 miles south of Busch Stadium, is
futile on a Sunday night. The whole town is closed, except
for a gas station that sells chicken sizzled in vats behind
the counter. I bought two pieces, but the bumpy road made
digestion unlikely, and they went uneaten.
About 20 miles later, in front of Trade World, a pawnshop on
Route 140 in Osceola, Ark., about 240 miles from Busch
Stadium, the reception is muddled and crackly. But there is
no mistaking Shannon's disappointed monotone as Boston's
Jonny Gomes hits a three-run home run to give Boston a 4-1
lead.
Shannon and Rooney continue the tradition of well-liked
announcers at KMOX, like Jack Buck and Caray, who did games
together beginning in 1954 when Buck joined Caray in the
booth (Joe Garagiola came along a year later) and KMOX
gained exclusive rights to the games for the next 51 years.
"It wasn't just the strength of the signal," said Bob
Costas, who broadcast the Spirits of St. Louis basketball
games on KMOX in the 1970s, years after he heard the signal
on Long Island as a boy. "It was also the quality of the
guys in the booth that drew people in. Back then, Harry was
not what many people remember in Chicago after his strokes.
At a time when the Cardinals were the farthest outpost in
baseball, he was a craftsman bringing the game to life for
people in Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kentucky."
One of those people was the Red Sox' owner, John Henry,
whose family moved from a farm in Illinois to a soybean and
cotton farm in Forrest City, Ark., when he was young. It was
there that he tuned in KMOX to hear Caray, Garagiola and
Buck describe the games.
"I had a great Zenith radio," Henry said. "But everyone in
the area could listen even with a little transistor."
And speaking of Kentucky, it is somewhere off to my left,
out there in the darkness. But now, not far from Memphis and
northern Mississippi, as the seventh inning begins, there is
incentive to get trucking. No more stopping in tiny towns
looking for Cardinals fans. Now it is interstate all the
way.
Of course, with today's technology, anyone with a smartphone
app could listen to the Boston station that is broadcasting
the game. But that's not the point.
I-55, Memphis & Arkansas Bridge
Reception is still strong as I head back across the
Mississippi south of Memphis, 288 miles from home plate. The
game is in the eighth inning. Tim McCarver, who is
broadcasting the game with Joe Buck on television on Fox,
grew up near here in Memphis listening to Buck and Caray and
Garagiola, who were almost as important to them as the
players.
"We would play games and do the voices at the same time,"
McCarver said. "The guy who did the best job imitating them
on that day, that's who won."
In 2006, a station with a 5,000-watt signal won the radio
rights to Cardinals games for five years, during which many
people complained that their reception was lost, so the team
returned to KMOX in 2011.
I pass into Mississippi, the fifth state on the journey, as
the game enters the ninth. There is a wider variety of
establishments to perhaps watch the end of the game and meet
a Cardinals fan in a far-flung land, someone whose roots to
the team connect to the ubiquitous KMOX signal. The Hooters
on Route 302 in Horn Lake, Miss., 310 miles from St. Louis,
is the closest.
Inside is Tony Davis, a Mississippi resident, watching the
game. Is he a KMOX listener? Is that how he became a Cards
fan? Or perhaps it was his father or grandfather who had
listened to Buck and Caray way back when.
"I'm a Yankee fan," he says.
With that, and payment for a club soda, it's back to the car
to hear the final outs of the game. The reception could not
be better. It is crystal clear, as if the station were
transmitting from the parking lot. Shannon wonders why the
Red Sox are even bothering to hold Kolten Wong on first base
in a two-run game. Then, bang, to Shannon's astonishment,
Wong is picked off first. Game over. At 10:51 p.m. Central.
I could not outrun the signal, even leaving two and a half
hours before the game.
KMOX wins in a blowout.
In fact, the reception is so clear, I probably could have
driven straight into the Gulf of Mexico and still heard the
sad postgame show. Instead, I listen to the hissing report -
the content of the show is hissing, not the signal
reception - as I head toward Memphis and the Blues City Cafe
for a well-deserved plate of ribs, full rack, and a last pit
stop at a West Memphis gas station.
And that's it, except for one thing: a 300-mile drive back
to St. Louis for Game 5 the same day. Perhaps I'll listen to
some music on the way.
Mike Duke, K5XU
American Council of Blind Radio Amateurs
Mike Duke, K5XU
American Council of Blind Radio Amateurs
Mike Duke, K5XU
American Council of Blind Radio Amateurs
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