Reliving Radio Days

My wife and I spent the weekend out of town or “off the mountain,” as many High Country residents say. Saturday morning we traveled to Elon, on the other side of Greensboro, for the college graduation of my cousin Don’s daughter Alicia.

Alicia and three of her graduating girlfriends held a joint celebratory luncheon at the Alamance Country Club near Burlington. It was exciting to see these four friends prepare to take their first professional steps into the world…and the luncheon’s appetizer of spicy crab bisque was perhaps the best soup I’ve ever tasted in my life!

Alicia Ay Reynolds, granddaughter of Boone’s Peggy Langdon, graduated from Elon this past Saturday with a degree in Musical Performance. Congratulations! Photo by Jeff Eason

I’m not a golfer so it is a rare pleasure when I can take a stroll on a golf course. The Alamance Country Club is beautiful and my wife, Leslie, and I noticed several bird species near the ninth hole that you don’t usually see in the High Country. Golf courses generally make wonderful hiking areas, especially if they are fairly free of golfers.

The second leg of our weekend getaway was spent in Chapel Hill where we attended a reunion of Tarheel alums who had worked at college radio station WXYC-FM. About 40 people attended the reunion party, including former disc jockeys (like myself) and their significant others. Most of the crowd had worked at the radio station in the early and mid-80s, although there were several others from the late 70s to early 90s.

My own group of new wavers at WXYC went on to an incredibly varied mix of career choices. At the reunion there was a professional massage therapist, a medical doctor, a research scientist, a realtor, some professional musicians and several business owners. Several of us have maintained a professional link with the entertainment media and of those who were not present at the reunion, one person is head of public relations for UNC-TV and another runs a lucrative production film company in the porn industry in Las Vegas (shocking but true).

Most of the reunion was spent catching up with old friends and trading homemade CDs of new wave music that we hoped captured the spirit of our radio days. If you’ve never heard the music of the X-Teens, the Pressure Boys, Arrogance, The Cramps or The Insect Surfers, you’ve missed out on some of the best original music of the 1980s.

One of the highlights of my tenure at WXYC was helping out with a benefit concert we staged in 1983 called the Carolina Concert for Children. The concert featured (in order of appearance) Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, the Producers, U2 and Todd Rundgren. One of the people at the reunion gave out CD copies of U2’s appearance at that concert that he recorded 24 years ago on a cassette recorder. If you’ve ever heard one of those Grateful Dead bootlegs with lots of crowd noise on it, you have an inkling of the sound quality. Still, it made me smile to hear Bono thanking us kids standing in the rain at Kenan Stadium all those years ago.

The rest of the trip was spent driving through Chapel Hill and Carrboro, marveling at both the things that have changed and the things that are the same as a quarter century ago.

One of the other things Leslie and I noticed about Chapel Hill and Carrboro is how many people ride bikes. In the High Country the only cyclists you see are the serious kind who ride thousand dollar bikes wearing bright racing outfits costing hundreds of dollars. In Chapel Hill, we saw the bike riders of our youth: kids with baseball cards in their spokes (for that classic motorized sound) and older people pedaling home from Weaver Street Market with wire baskets full of groceries.

Some people believe that bicycling is not as prevalent in the High Country because of our steep hills. I think it is because of our narrow streets.

Chapel Hill and many other towns in North Carolina have made developing bike lanes and alternate bike paths a priority of their city planning. Quite frankly, Boone and its surrounding areas have not.

About ten years ago I lived in a house close to where Ingles Supermarket in Boone is today. A couple times I decided to ride my bike downtown. I quickly learned how biker-unfriendly Hwy 105 is.

Bike riding should be enjoyable but when your primary thought is whether you are going to have an open or closed casket funeral after being run over by an asphalt truck, it kind of ruins the experience.

It is no surprise then that very very few Watauga High students ride their bikes to school. Here’s hoping that town planners try to rectify that situation as they develop a vision for the new high school. With its location in a rural part of Perkinsville near the New River, the new school will be easily accessible by bicycle from a number of family neighborhoods. From the Watauga Medical Center area, for example, you could access the Greenway Trail and bike to the new high school quicker than it would take to drive to it.

With enough public support for bike lanes and alternate paths, Boone and its surrounding neighborhoods could be transformed into a bike-friendly region within a few years. That in turn would lead to less traffic congestion and a healthier citizenry.