![]() ![]() We hadn't lived there long before my father had a radio room framed out in the basement, and a growing assortment of antennas on the roof. We lived in a split, with three bedrooms up above, a two-car garage, and an unfinished basement below. I have my first recollections of this in the early 70s, living in Pepperell. My father's passion for all things audio were all around me as a child. Ella points to the speakers and says, "Simon!" The music plays. Simon says: "WVCA Gloucester Massachusetts" and announces the next piece. My two-year-old grand daughter, Ella, comes running in from the next room. Program 12 plays from the speakers on my computer. Sorry, Simon.Īfter dinner I run the final product. Listeners will not appreciate music they can't enjoy. Is he telling me to sacrifice the damaged tracks? I can't spend any more time on this with another 50-some-odd programs yet to digitize and process. All done with such attention to engineering detail. Simon took great care in this transcription. The audio is sweet and mostly free from noise or distortion. What would Simon do? I listen to the other undamaged parts of the program. Maybe I should just leave them be, even though the music is hard to listen to. How dare I mess with his selections? These tracks were there for a good reason. The audio is so badly damaged on several tracks that I may have to edit them out. The fragile 30-year-old tape has seen better days. Later, I pull up the files from reel 12 that was loaded earlier in the day onto the drive. What was he trying to say through his selections? Was he really broadcasting his passion? Sharing an intimate part of himself? Speaking with an eloquence his vocally-challenged and sometimes colorful on-air persona could not? How did he come to this playlist? Anyone who has ever programmed classical music for radio knows that the pieces you choose for broadcast reflect a personal part of you. Simon was a well-educated radio engineer with valuable skills. He barely scraped by, mostly on donations. So why did he spend so many years playing his music here? Was it just a job? That's hard to fathom. It was well known that he left town and never looked back. What would he say if he were here and could witness what we were doing? Would he approve of our project to bring his hard work back from the grave and give it new life on a new format he never could have imagined? He said he wanted to be forgotten. Yet another ancient reel of tape would be spinning on the deck and from it his unique announcing style and playlist would return from the stasis of over 30 years and flow into my hard drive in incomprehensibly tiny bits. His voice would come floating from my studio monitors. For the last five months, Simon has greeted me very early every day: "WVCA Gloucester Massachusetts" has been his way of saying good morning. ![]() And maybe I do, in some ways, as well as anyone still around. I never met him, but I feel as if I know him. ![]()
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