By Walter Geiger On one of the first really cold mornings of the winter, I walked out to my Jeep to head to work only to find it would not start. Dead as a doornail a they said back in the day. I hooked my fancy charge box to the Jeep battery and it immediately took the box from near full charge down to 40%. Despite that power draw, the usually trusty Rubicon still would not start. I arranged for alternative transportation and called for help. When I returned later in the afternoon, there was a new battery in the Jeep and it started right up so I drove it back to the office that evening. I worked for about 90 minutes before calling it quits. I headed into the cold night and, you guessed it, the new battery was likewise doing its doornail impression. To paraphrase the shortest verse in the Bible, Walter cursed. The new development mystified a phalanx of mechanics for a time before it was determined that my CD player that I rarely used was constantly trying to change CDs whether the Jeep was running or not. Nothing could stop it except pulling the fuse on the entire radio module until it could be replaced. My history with car radios goes way back to listening to WLS out of Chicago, WLAC of Nashville and WOWO from Fort Wayne, Indiana. By carefully tuning these in on the AM dial you could get the latest in rock and roll and soul music interspersed with considerable static. I remember clearly when FM radio was developed and the static largely disappeared. We were all amazed and we were largely unconcerned when our eight-track or cassette tape decks ate our tapes as they often did. Ruined eight rack and cassette tapes are a once common form of litter that has completely vanished from the modern landscape. Discarded music compilations with yards of brown tape blowing in the wind were once a common roadside visual. Having always been surrounded in my vehicles by music and, in later years, 24 hour news, I now was surrounded by silence and have been for about two months because I have been too lazy or too busy to get the radio unit replaced. Strangely, I have gotten used to the silence. If I am on a long drive, I can put in earphones and listen to Pandora on my iPhone. Driving around town, I miss the news and weather updates from WSB but I don’t really feel any less informed. If I need to know what is going on, it is pretty easy to find out. I could probably go on without the radio unit for an extended time but its failure also took out the only two jacks in the Jeep that can charge my phone which endangers my other source of music and all communication with the known world. Therefore the radio will eventually get fixed. Perhaps I can get a new fangled one that has Sirius or XM. I would settle for the sweet old sounds from WLS, WLAC and WOWO but they are long gone.
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