As I was growing up it seemed as if music was always around me in one way or another, so it's not remarkable that I formed an appreciation for it. Even when I was young, I would endlessly spin the old records we had stacked up around the house and I also listened to all kinds of music on the radio.

But in addition to the music itself, I was also interested in the technical side of the electrical gizmos that produced it — especially radios, and later TVs — and would often disassemble them to try to learn how they functioned. I don't know if that was necessarily a good idea, but I do know that I quickly learned that those old units could hold a charge even if unplugged. I lost count of the times that I got zapped when I wasn't expecting it, and if my mother had known about my close calls she'd have been...well, shocked. (Sorry.)

Once when I was staying with my grandparents at their rural home, they took me along with them to a country auction, and as I wandered around looking at the items being readied for bidding I spotted an old console radio. This was about the time that more and more people were getting rid of those old dinosaurs and buying new smaller table models, and a lot of folks were even buying those new-fangled picture boxes called televisions. However, to me it was an opportunity to have my very own radio - to listen to music with or to take apart and explore to my heart's content.

Since it was old and worn I thought maybe I had a chance in the auction, and I was flush with earnings from my paper route and eager to buy. Excitedly I waited for the radio to come under the auctioneer's hammer, and luckily my Granddad was there to help me with the auction process, although he grumbled at my "foolishness" - especially when the auctioneer admitted that he wasn't sure the radio even worked. I think I paid something like two dollars for it and was as happy as a possum in a pumpkin patch.

I'd like to be able to report that the radio worked just fine for me or that I'd been able to fix it, but the truth is that I could never get that thing working. Still, it might have been worth the two dollars just for all the enjoyment I had in tinkering with it, and that experience might have helped me a few years later when I had a little more success with another project, my very own personal TV.

By my mid-teens, I had continued to diddle with radios and the like, and had even saved my money and bought myself a decent (and new!) Hallicrafters short-wave receiver. I used to listen to it late in the evening when I was in bed, and it was quite an experience for an insulated American kid in the 1950s. I could find music from other countries all over the dial, and I remember also that Radio Moscow broadcast in English, with occasional newscasts of debatable value, but programming that exposed me for the first time to classical music.