Rainy night, Shennandoah National Park, ~1997: after hiking half a dozen miles down trail, crisscrossing countless streams, and surveying Camp Hoover (a cabin retreat once used by a US President), a troopful of footsore Boy Scouts set up their tents in a soggy, stony field. Sleep comes slowly — and when you awaken at 3am what is there to do in the chill hours of darkness that remain before dawn?
Good answer: listen to the radio. It was at that campout that Son Merle found a commercial-free classical station that ventured beyond the usual top-40 mix of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, et al. for its playlist. Through some freak of electromagnetic propagation, on that Appalachian mountainside his little receiver picked up WBJC in Baltimore, more than 100 miles away.
When we got home, we kept listening. WBJC is the descendant of a station founded in 1951 at Baltimore Junior College, a school that no longer exists (at least under that name). The WBJC signal is often weak, but the music is good and the announcers are great. One in particular has captured my ear and, from afar, my heart: Judith Krummeck. Her delicate South African accent is delightful, and her knowledge of the arts plus her idiosyncratic dry sense of humor make her show a unique pleasure: when the music pauses, I turn the volume up rather than down to make sure that I can hear her voice clearly. Go Judith!
(see [1] and [2] — plus CountrySightsAndSounds (7 Aug 2001), GettysburgCoordinates (27 Feb 2002), ...)
TopicPersonalHistory - TopicArt - TopicProfiles - 2003-02-26
(correlates: XmasChrononauts, GradePointAverage, ThreeMooseketeers, ...)