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From: Mark Connelly, WA1ION
This is being written on the 50th anniversary of the Great Northeast Blackout
of 1965. Power went out in large parts of New York, New England, and some
other adjacent states and Canadian provinces.
The evening of November 9, 1965 was going on pretty much like any other
after-school night. At my family home in Arlington, MA we had just finished
supper. It was a chilly night outside and I went in the living room to do a
little radio listening on a Realistic TRF portable (
http://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/html/1964/h080.html ) that had good
sensitivity to pick up the many AM music stations from around the northeastern
United States and adjacent parts of Canada.
A bit after 5 p.m. I was listening to WNJR on 1430, a black R&B station
skipping in from Newark, NJ (after local WHIL Medford had done its sunset
sign-off). The song "Two is a Couple (Three is a Crowd)" by Ike & Tina Turner
( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GUA5IaDhOw ) was playing. At 5:17 p.m. the
lights dimmed, blinked off, blinked on, and then quickly went off to stay off
for quite a while. The radio became the only link to the outside world that
ran on battery power, so its role became much more important than usual
functions as a source of music and long-distance hobby listening ("DXing").
I was a junior in high school at the time and was developing an avid interest
in electronics. I was already building the occasional project and logging many
broadcasts from around the world. A couple of my friends (Phil [later N1PZU]
and Dick [WA1FAE / later KB1DN]) chatted with me on CB channel 11 from time to
time on 100 milliwatt walkie talkies ('
http://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/html/1965-a/h003.html ' or similar)
including, I think, during the blackout. In less than two years I would be a
licensed radio amateur (now WA1ION).
The world of 1965 was one that had recent memories of the Cuban Missile Crisis
and JFK assassination. The Vietnam War was starting to ramp up and civil
rights struggles rocked many cities. Late that summer, folk protest music was
making a resurgence with Bob Dylan's songs and "Eve of Destruction" by Barry
McGuire ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntLsElbW9Xo ). Such music had been
earlier in vogue around '62 and '63 but was sidetracked a while by the British
Invasion juggernaut. Cold War hysteria was never much below the surface in the
autumn of 1965. The massive popularity of James Bond spy movies and of TV
shows such as "Man from U.N.C.L.E." and "The Avengers" had a lot of appeal to
young people. Sci-fi was also big. Space exploration and science had a
certain amount of a "cool" factor; kids interested in it weren't necessarily
thought of as geeks and nerds. Boston's Route 128 technology belt was growing
by leaps and bounds as government and private money poured into aerospace,
defense, computer, and telecommunications advances. Proximity to world-class
universities spurred much of the activity.
As I listened to the radio that November evening, it quickly became apparent
that this blackout was not one of the usual ones just affecting our street and
maybe, at most, a couple of others nearby - your typical branch-lands-on-wire
or car-hits-pole scenario.
Reports came in not only from nearby Boston but also Providence, New York,
Albany, and quite a few other locales with stations that I could receive on the
transistor radio.
There was a pervasive uneasiness out there and various theories running from
Russian sabotage to domestic loonies / criminals to UFO's abounded.
The AM dial was an interesting mix of absent usual signals - gone with the loss
of power - and other stations which had managed, thanks to generator
availability, to come back on. Leading local Top 40 station WMEX 1510 lost
power at the Boston studio but managed to get a generator going at the
transmitter site, then located in North Quincy, MA. An improvised broadcast
got going when some of the staff arrived there from Boston, 6 miles to the
north. But either the voltage level or AC frequency of the generator was a bit
off as records being played lurched along between too slow and too fast. I
remember "Let's Hang On" by the Four Seasons (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8782KIj_rKw ) playing in a most discordant
manner. Aware of the problem, the people at the transmitter quit music for a
while and just talked.
Houses started getting chilly as many furnaces wouldn't fire up without
electricity. Fortunately the power did come back and a more normal pace of
life returned.
There is an online article written by a New York City broadcast professional
that gives a good insight of how various stations responded to the blackout:
http://nrcdxas.org/articles/blkout1.html
Some other links:
Dan Ingram on WABC New York
http://www.mediafire.com/download/c2020aqx6j38m3b/WABC+1965+Blackout-1.mp3
Action at WDRC Hartford, CT
https://www.facebook.com/groups/transmittersites/permalink/969803296414651/
NBC TV news coverage
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o47VVM5riaQ
Boston Globe 50th anniversary articles
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/11/08/the-day-massachusetts-went-dark-fifty-years-later/EjabrHTQkJpRFn4eYuThcN/story.html
http://www.boston.com/news/history/2015/11/09/remembering-the-day-boston-went-dark-years-ago/X4Be7F3fiGx3mw3QbFC5tK/story.html?s_campaign=bcom%3Asocialflow%3Afacebook
How I Got Started in Radio and Electronics
http://www.qsl.net/wa1ion/wa1ion_history.htm
Besides songs mentioned in the narrative above, some of the other big hits I
remember on Top 40 radio around then include:
Look Through Any Window (Hollies) .. their greatest
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3B2_OTRpPd4
Turn, Turn, Turn (Byrds) .. taken from the Bible and huge follow-up to
Dylan-written "Mr. Tambourine Man" of the early summer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKP4cfU28vM
Something About You (Four Tops) .. soul classic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6P-v5RD02g
Rescue Me (Fontella Bass) .. another soul classic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9mp3s2gpy8
Five O'Clock World (Vogues) .. working man's anthem
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQ9Nm_c3GVY
Get Off My Cloud (Rolling Stones) .. Stones string of successes continues
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlhPRuAve8k
Mystic Eyes (Them) featuring Van Morrison
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Bo3IwYZlkw
I'm a Man (Yardbirds) rocked-up blues
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAdCePtwoW4
Liar Liar (Castaways) .. garage monster
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EpP9DPZ0Xo
Sounds of Silence (Simon & Garfunkel) .. title cut from an outstanding album
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fWyzwo1xg0
Once a week, WBZ's Jefferson Kaye brought us to an alternate universe of folk
music and, occasionally, blues. Here are two of the more important tunes
spinning in late 1965:
Children of Darkness (Richard & Mimi Farina)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWPjWh_EwBo
Shake Your Money Maker (Paul Butterfield Blues Band)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1L2vJ0U4Bc
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