Is this the entertainment system you had in your car?

So much of what we take for granted today was not even around in 1958. Such simple things as listening to music in the car while driving was not always possible. Car and Driver Magazine did an article a few years back on the history of the car radio and it can be seen at:

http://www.caranddriver.com/features/the-history-of-car-radios

How you listened to music, news, or old time radio shows depended on geogra-phy. If you lived in Atlanta, Macon, Columbus or even Fort Valley, there was at least one radio station that you could listen to in your car and some you could lis-ten to at night. As far as music, that was the only way to do it for the most of us unless you carried around a Martin guitar. But, if you lived in Roberta, Reynolds, Butler, Musella, Moran, or Sandy Point, that was another story. All you might hear there was static!

Car and Driver points out that the first car radio was developed in 1930 and the name Motorola was born. Car radios were an option and they were AM only in most cars because there were few FM stations around. No one had ever heard of satellite radio, blue tooth, or a tape player, disc player, or MP3

Car radios gave you a “buzz” when you turned them on in the old days because they all had a “vibrator” to make them functional. It made a humming or buzzing sound and most car owners learned how to replace them as they burned out fre-quently.

If you were lucky enough to live in a town of any size, they probably had one or more low power, 1000 watt AM radio stations that could be heard locally but their range was low, especially at night. A lot of stations were daylight only stations.

Most stations that could be heard during the day had to reduce their power at night to prevent interfering with stations on the same frequency in other areas due to “bounce” or “skip”. Many stations used the same frequency across the country and conflict was managed by controlling the power and using directional antennas and, in some cases, having stations go silent after dark.

WMAZ in Macon was 940 on the dial and was 50,000 watts during the day. It could be heard over a wide area during the daylight but at night, the 5 antennas were phased and the power was reduced to 5,000 watts and you could barely hear it in Lizella. None of the several other stations could be heard outside of town. WBML, WNEX, and WIBB come to mind. No one listened to FM radio in those days as most people did not have one. Sandy Point did not have a radio sta-tion: imagine that!

So if you were out in Sandy Point, and you wanted to hear Ferlin Husky, Kitty Wells, Jimmy Reed or Muddy Waters, what did you do? Was there any hope?

Well, you started spinning the dial over at the far end around 550 Kilocycles( now referred to as Kilohertz in honor of Mr. Hertz ) and you might find WLAC in Nash-ville, Tenn. coming in that night. It would be a “Jumping John R” night with rhythm and blues and you would hear songs like “Big Boss Man”. John R was a white guy that had learned the language of the black community and was the forerunner of such radio personalities across the country as “Wolfman Jack”.

There is a great tribute to John R. on you tube and if you have never heard it, I
invite you to listen to the real John R at:

Put your cursor on the link, hold own CTRL button and click. If you are under 50, you’ve never heard anything like it!

Coming on across the dial was 650, WSM, clear channel radio in Nashville. Now there you would find your “hillbilly”, now called country music: Eddie Arnold and Hank Snow, Hank Williams and Ernest Tubb. And, the Grand Ole Opry which is the longest running radio show ever.

There were a number of possibilities, depending on weather, etc. There was WWL in New Orleans which catered to truck drivers. WGN and WLS in Chicago, WOWO in Indiana, WCKY in Cincinnati just in case you wanted to hear country music and order some Rhode Island Red chickens! WLW was there too. But you could not hear the Macon stations 25 miles away.

There was WHO in Des Moines and WBT in Charlotte. These big 50,000 watt sta-tions, and others spread across the country, were the nighttime source of music and news for the rural areas. And, on a given night, you listened to what you could pick up.

Then there was XERF in Del Rio, Texas that had its 100,000 watt transmitter sitting in Mexico and it blanked the Southwest and could be heard frequently at night in Georgia. It was finally forced to reduce power by international agreement.

For farm news, it was WSB 750 in Atlanta every day at noon. Prices on beef cattle, hogs, chickens and eggs. Corn, wheat, and cotton. Soybeans were just coming into favor as an alternative crop. But here you heard the farm report and knew all about pork bellies!

They tried a few things to get recorded music into use in cars including Mr. Lear’s (yes this was the same guy that invented Lear Jets) 8 track tapes that were not too reliable but it wasn’t until the cassette tape player was invented in the 70’s that portable, on demand music became a routine thing and cars were soon strewn from front seat to back with tapes! The world has not been the same since! People have been walking around with earplugs ever since as well as driving around with radios blaring at all hours, even in Lee Pope and Zenith at midnight!

Today, it is Satellite and Blue Tooth. Ipods and Smartphones. All synced up and playing away! And, I suppose, the folks at “WCKY, Cincinnati 1, Ohio” and “WLAC, Nashville, Tennessee” are probably out of the chicken business!! And, you haven’t been able to find any peace and quiet since!

Peaches

Things can get confusing at times. You may have noticed that, I’m sure.
Take for example, the Georgia License Plates and other State items where the State nickname is shown: The Peach State. And, yes, that is referred to as the State’s nickname. When I voted the other day they gave me a little sticker to put on my shirt to let everyone know I was a “Peach State” voter. I actually was a little embarrassed to let anyone know I voted for any of the riff- raft we have so I did not put it on.
It may be a surprise to learn that peaches are not native to the US but in fact were brought here from China via Europe! This Chinese influx did not just recently get started and we have ingrained their influence into the fabric of our society! Every time we enjoy a peach, we owe it to the Chinese! And, China is the world’s largest producer of peaches.
To make the subject of peaches and the “Peach State” nick name even more confusing, Georgia is not the largest producer of peaches in the US. Not by a long spit of a peach seed. California is tops in production of peaches and the latest production figures I found said they produced 713,000 tons while South Carolina produced 95,000 tons and Georgia as a distant third with 36,000 tons. Georgia has about 1/20th of the California production of peaches. So you can see how misleading the Peach State name on our stuff could be.
California is referred to as the Golden State but produces more peaches than Georgia which calls itself the Peach State and Georgia produces fewer peaches than South Carolina which calls itself the Palmetto State. Georgia was the site of the first US gold rush so why wasn’t Georgia called the Golden State and California could rightly call itself the Peach State. Today, at Publix, they had peaches from Chile. I really prefer the peaches from Lane or Pearson or some other Peach County orchard. Dickey packing shed in Musella is in operation after all these years and I usually get there once or twice a summer. I worked there one or two summers as well as a couple of the others near Fort Valley.
Some info says that the State Legislature was convinced to adopt the Peach State nickname because Georgia has the best peaches, not necessarily the most. I would not argue with the fact that we have better peaches than California. This convincing, though, may have been done by a few big peach growers who also were heavy political contributors. Hopefully that has cleared all of that up for the reader.
Just for the record, the UGA Center for Agribusiness & Economic Development does not list peaches in the top 10 of Georgia’s Commodities. Blueberries out- rank peaches in sales. Chickens are the top agriculture item. Beef is second. Cotton is the top crop. Peanut and pecans are high on the list. I believe Georgia is the leading producer of pecans, whether you call them P-Cons or P-Cans. Nice that we don’t have that pronunciation problem with peaches. Everyone seems to pronounce peaches the same.
But, in Sandy Point and vicinity, peaches are/were important and, back in the day, the fact that they required a lot of manual labor to pick and pack and ship made working in peaches an important summertime activity in a job scarce community. A number of orchards and packing houses were in operation during the months that school was out and many high school students worked in peaches to earn some school clothes money. Many adults did as well.
My grandmother worked in peaches in Zenith and Lee Pope when she was a girl and they had dormitories there for the workers to stay in. A building or two still stands in that area, I believe though unused for many years. I was in a packing shed last summer and there are still a number of people working there but a lot of the jobs are filled today by migrant workers.
Peaches are picked by hand and there is a lot of hard work involved. The peaches are then loaded into wagons pulled by tractors and brought to the packing shed. They are graded out, sent through washers and coolers and packed into shipping boxes that are loaded into refrigerated trucks or rail cars to be sent to their destination. Many of the packing sheds sell baskets and cartons of the already ripened fruit on site and make ice cream and other items to sell in their restaurants in some cases and have established gift shops to attract a larger audience. Peach Cobbler and fried peach pies made with the fresh peaches are my favorites. We won’t even talk about fresh peach ice cream! And road side stands selling peaches and hand painted “Fresh Peaches” signs can be found at nearly every exit on I-75 from Valdosta to Chattanooga. They tend to have boiled peanuts at those places as well.
When the crops were good, the packing would start as the trailers started arriving at the shed in the early afternoons and would continue into the night to try and pack and ship everything that was picked that day. The pickers arrived early and worked in the hot sun. As the sun went down, the packing sheds worked into the evenings and were cooler and there was a glow about them as the lights came on and the bugs darted around them into the night.
There was a social aspect and romances among the teenagers were common. Kids that had little money now had a paycheck, or in some cases, a little brown envelope with money. There were Nehi Orange drinks and Moon Pies. Camels and Pall Mall cigarettes could be seen lit up in the parking lots. An occasional beer was sipped in the backseat of the 1949 Ford where they could not be seen. There was a flurry of activity from May to August and sometimes you could work at one packing shed for the early crops and another for the late crops. As time went on, packing sheds packed for other growers and there were fewer of them. And, fewer kids wanted to work there.
Those were fun times and kids learned a lot about life and work and having a responsibility. It was over every summer before it began it seemed. But there are a lot of kids who would not take anything for having had that experience. It would be a good experience for some today. And, one that many people would like to do just one more time.

Sandy Point Ice Cream

Sandy Point Ice Cream is not a brand you will likely see in Publix or Kroger’s. Sandy Point Ice Cream was produced in small hand cranked ice cream churn on the back steps at my grandmother’s house. And it was never on the spur of the moment but required planning.

The ingredients for the ice cream had to be accumulated, ice cream salt and ice purchased at the ice house and there had to be a lot of cranking, cranking, cranking. The cranking would require a lot of energy on a hot day and produced sweat and made the cranker very thirsty which in turn made the ice cream taste even better. Nothing like homemade ice cream!
So this was a process that fed on itself. The more the cranking and the hotter the day, the better the ice cream would taste! And, it was all consumed at the time of manufacture. No fancy cartons or graphics were required. We had never heard of Haagen-Dazs or Blue Bell. There was some Borden’s and Pet around in town, I think. Refrigeration was in short supply for many years and keeping anything frozen, well that was to come later. Then, we were likely to have nuggets and creamsicles.
Did you know? (Source IDFA Ice Cream Survey)?
• The average American consumes more than 23 pounds of ice cream per year.
• Regular ice cream is the most popular category of frozen desserts and U.S. ice cream companies made more than 898 million gallons of regular ice cream in 2015.
• The production of low-fat ice cream, the second most popular category, increased by 20 million gallons in 2015.
Hard frozen dairy desserts accounted for almost 75 percent of all frozen dairy products made in 2015
• About 1.54 billion gallons of ice cream and related frozen desserts were produced in the U.S. in 2015.
The majority of U.S. ice cream and frozen dessert manufacturers have been in business for more than 50 years and many are still family-owned businesses. The ice cream industry in the United States contributes more than $39.0 billion to the national economy and creates more than 188,000 jobs in communities across the country.
June is the highest production month of the year, but production remains strong through August to satisfy summer demand. Production declines through the end of the year.
Down at Sandy Point, we never calculated the cost of the ice cream, as far as I know. And, no one was aware how much ice cream was being consumed. It was a special treat and would be done when company came to visit or for birthdays, etc. Not every day. And, if peaches were in season, well, that was just added deliciousness, a gallon at the time.

My grandfather loved ice cream and had a habit of stopping at what was Sanders Brothers’ Store on the way back from the farmers market. They sold the paper cups of ice cream with a little wooden spoon and they were about a nickel as I recall. They may have been ten cents. Whichever, they were good. Especially after getting up at about 4:00 AM and spending all day at the market selling peas, butter beans, and tomatoes.

We are never without some ice cream in our freezer and occasionally I buy a plastic bag of the paper cups of Blue Bell Ice Cream up at Publix. Those nickel or dime cups are now about fifty cents when you buy 12 in the bag. They are still good!
We went to Sears a few days back up at the mall. Just outside the entrance to Sears is a Haagen-Dazs space that sells cups of their ice cream. I ordered us two of the nickel cups of butter pecan. Needless to say, I was a little shocked when the guy rang up our two nickel cups and said, “That will be eleven dollars and thirty five cents, please.”

He did say please. I thought that was a nice touch.
I commented that that was pretty pricey for two small cups and he told me I was paying for quality. I am not too sure about that.
Philip Crosby wrote a book about Quality and defined it as “Conformance to requirements.” That book set the stage for the new era in manufacturing and competing on the world stage with the Japanese and others.
If his definition is correct, Blue Bell is “quality” as far as I’m concerned. It conforms to my requirements and I can buy gallon for about what the two small cups of the Haagen-Dazs costs!

Those old hand cranked churns gave way to electric models that plugged in to the wall and whined and hummed and made ice cream but part of the charm was gone. Not as much sweat and work and the ice cream was a little different somehow. At some point, it just wasn’t worth the effort anymore and the churns became junk for the land fill or the antique store. The process for enjoying ice cream had changed for most although the churns are still available. I have not seen one in use lately.
Home made ice cream? That’s funny. That’s the name on the vanilla ice cream I buy at Publix. Homemade Vanilla. Made in some plant in Texas or someplace. Home made, indeed! But, it is good!

As the world continues to change, my grandchildren have probably never seen or tasted ice cream made in a hand cranked churn. And will never miss it. And, they can enjoy as much ice cream as they want from Publix or the Dairy Queen. I guess that will have to do. And their taste buds will never know the difference. I have to go now because my ice cream is melting.

JC© 2018

I have just released a new book entitled A One Way Ride. The book is a fictional story about the world of human trafficking as best I can understand it.

While this is a book of fiction, the story of human trafficking is all too real and current. This is a real problem with real victims and real human tragedies. One that is seldom talked about.

Human trafficking is a real story of loss of personal freedom, dignity, and hope. One of worldwide scope. But, also, a criminal activity that goes on in the cities and towns where we live. Often unnoticed and unreported. The real numbers? Well, it appears they are more guesses than actual counts but all too high, whichever the case.

To learn more about human trafficking, to seek help, or to report suspected human trafficking, please call the National Human Trafficking Resource Center, Toll Free. 24 Hours a day.

1-888-373-7888.

Or, call your local authorities or the FBI.

You may save a life.

JC