Fourteen hundred days, plus one

The number 1400 means a little more than the average four-digit numeral to me, largely because I spent 11 years of my life speaking into microphones that carried my voice into the atmosphere at 1400 kilohertz.

When I was a kid growing up in New Jersey, for many summers in the 1950s and ’60s, we would spend a week or two at a cabin along Lake Champlain in Milton, Vermont. Occasionally we would venture into nearby Burlington for dinner and a stroll around town.

One such stroll took us past the storefront studio of WDOT, a popular radio station at 1400 kHz on the AM dial. I watched, enraptured, as a guy sat at a control panel and played music and commercials. My most vivid memory is that when he announced what time it was, he called it “chime time” and rang a bell — “Chime Time is 8:14, folks [DING!]” and for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out where the bell was.

I trace my fascination with radio to two things — my dad’s enthusiasm for his ham radio operation and WDOT’s storefront studio. They led directly to the 22 years I spent doing radio news in the first half of my post-collegiate career.

A somewhat circuitous route took me to the studios of WDUZ in Green Bay, which happens to operate at 1400. Now, there were hundreds of stations at 1400. It’s probably the most populated of what are called “local” channels, where the stations are limited to broadcasting at no more than 1,000 watts because they were originally designed to serve a limited geographic area. There are five stations at 1400 scattered around Wisconsin alone.

My time reporting the news on WDUZ from 1984 to 1996 was my favorite job ever, until I found myself as editor of the venerable Door County Advocate newspaper a few years later. In both places I worked as part of a quality team that was highly respected in its respective industry, if I say so myself, but eventually they were absorbed into large corporations that didn’t value quality as much as we did.

The mind being as goofy as it is, these memories flooded back as I prepared to post yesterday’s blog entry, which happens to have been the 1,400th consecutive daily post since I started doing this every day on Aug. 1, 2020.

P.S. As near as I can figure out, the Chime Time bell must have been on a cart, that is to say, a tape cartridge programmed to cue itself up so that when it’s time to be played, you press a button and there it is.

W.B. at the Movies: Lost Angel – The Genius of Judee Sill

Tears — tears all the way through watching Lost Angel: The Genius of Judee Sill, the documentary about the truly great singer-songwriter who released two of the greatest albums of the 1970s but died young in obscurity when the albums just didn’t sell.

I was one of the relative handful of people who “got” Judee Sill instantly. I sat enraptured listening to Judee Sill in the studio of my college radio station and was able to repeat the experience many years later when I finally heard Heart Food, which had somehow escaped even my attention.

Sill is at the top of my “you have got to hear this” list of artists who didn’t get the attention they deserved when their brilliant work was first released into the wild. I have sung her praises for more than 50 years. Her songs are always interesting, and a few of them — “The Lamb Ran Away with the Crown,” “Lady-O,” “The Kiss,” and “The Donor” for example — cross the line into unspeakable, unmatchable beauty.

“She had more musical chops than any of the people on the scene except for Brian Wilson,” Linda Ronstadt says early on in the 2022 film, which at last is available for rent or purchase on Apple TV and Prime Video, and that puts the finger on why loving Judee Sill’s music has been so frustrating: She really does belong to be mentioned with Wilson among the greatest modern singer-songwriters, but it’s only in the latest 20 years that it’s finally begun to happen, 45 years after she died.

To hear Ronstadt, Shawn Colvin and so many other talented people talk about Sill’s gift is so affirming, and to hear people finally discovering her genius is so bittersweet.

She was a hard person to like sometimes, and self-destructive, which probably contributed to the lack of attention. The film is sad and illustrates how she was her own worst enemy, but it’s ultimately triumphant because it allows her music to shine at last.

Uncle Warren’s Attic presents Ebenezer, Stave 5: ‘Boxing Day’

Will Edmund Filliput’s beloved, Isabella, come to breakfast with Edmund and the happy stranger on the day after Christmas? We find out in the gentle conclusion of Ebenezer: A sequel of sorts to A Christmas Carol.

Of course, this podcast series has been partially an attempt to encourage you to purchase your own keepsake copy of the book, now available in electronic, hardcover and softcover formats. But it’s also my Christmas gift to the universe, a sweet little story that I am proud to have been the human funnel for. For the last five weeks I have been reading you a chapter a week. It only has five chapters, so here’s the end, just in time for Christmas, my present to you and yours.

I spent the first half of 2023 in a nightmare and the second half of 2023 in mourning. I am not going to list 2023 among my 70 favorite years (I’m finishing off my 71st).

But 2023 is also the year I completed Ebenezer: A sequel of sorts to A Christmas Carol, and I am grateful to the God of the universe for distracting me from my sorrow to help me concoct a joyful story of redemption to brighten this season of light a little more.

(P.S. Sharp listeners will catch a cameo appearance by Dejah Thoris, Princess of Mars, under the last line of the story.)

To hear the whole story:

STAVE 1

STAVE 2

STAVE 3

STAVE 4