My Adventures Over the Airwaves Part 4: Breaker Breaker One Nine, anybody got their ears on?

A side effect of that 70's kick I've been on this past year is that I came across this, from the second highest grossing movie of 1977 (pretty sure you can figure out what was #1 that year):

No, not the part of the scene with the cat house*, but all the usage of CB radio to communicate between truckers, the Bandit, Foxy Lady, and Cledus (and Fred the Basset Hound). While Citizens' Band radio --CB radio for short-- had a spike in use in the early 70s due to the speed limits created to fight the gas crisis, songs such as Convoy and movies such as Smokey and the Bandit and Convoy** caused CB radio to explode in popularity.

You know it's big when the President gets on a CB.
From Ridiculous 70s memes.

Even I, who wasn't allowed to watch Smokey and the Bandit (something about bad words and women doing "unladylike things"), knew of CB radio. I remember as a kid getting a brochure from a shoe store of all places*** that contained a conversion list of what all the CB "Ten Codes" were. At some point I also obtained a picture story about a kid who learns about CB radio and gets a base station as a gift, and when he hears a family friend (a trucker) call for help on the CB he gets his parents to call for help from the Fire Department. While both the book and brochure are long gone, they obviously left a lasting impression. 

I, like many kids of that era, had a pair of walkie talkies that were basically crap. The concept of having true portable communication was simply out of reach unless you owned a CB.

And no, we never owned a CB radio. 

From the 1978 Radio Shack catalog, page 160.
From radioshackcatalogs.com.

Although they were all over the place.

From the Amazon of 1978, the Sears catalog.
From the Fall/Winter 1978 Sears catalog, page 1174.
Yes, that was PAGE 1174.
From christmas.musetechnical.com.

Even at Kmart...

This was back when Kmart had a good reputation.
This is a 1976 Kmart at for CB Radios.
From 42444189@N04 on Flickr.

For starters, my parents weren't well off, and they considered items such as a CB radio an extravagance. I mean, we didn't get a color television until 1980, or a "nice" stereo system of any sort until ~1978. Our Christmas budget was $20, so my brother and I would comb through the Sears catalogs trying to find enough bang for the buck to stretch that $20 as far as it could go. Even then, my parents would nix certain presents, such as some of those Battlestar Galactica toys because they shot small projectiles. Later, when I had a job --and a car-- and I was told I could buy a car stereo once I saved up enough money, my dad flat out refused to let me get the stereo I'd saved for because "it was a waste of money".****

So you can imagine that my parents didn't want to buy a CB radio.

However, some family friends did have CB radios, and one year when we went on an extended weekend's vacation with them they offered to loan us one of their CBs as well as an antenna with a magnet mount and a felt bottom so as to not scratch the paint job on the car. The idea was that we would be able to coordinate on things such as stopping for lunch. Well, there was also just chatting while driving as well, the sort of thing that CB radio is really good at. The family friends talked up how great it was to chat like that and make the multi-hour drive that much easier.

Still, my parents refused to borrow a CB radio for the trip.

I suspect that my dad didn't want to risk scratching the paint on his then new station wagon, but he probably also thought that using a CB radio was "beneath" him for some reason. Or maybe he was concerned that I might hear some profanity, but given that I heard plenty of profanity all over the place (especially from my fellow Catholic students) I thought that possibility rather silly. But my parents kind of lived in an alternate universe where PG films were considered risqué.*****

As time went on, my interest in CB radio waned as my teen years went on and I gained access to a car and (more importantly) a car stereo. Well, there was also that thing about girls, I suppose, but to a geeky teen that was more hypothetical until I went to college.

***

When I worked at Radio Shack after college, I was less concerned about CB radio than shortwave radio and the burgeoning PC market, but we did sell our share of CB equipment. I used to get copies of Popular Communications magazine from bookstores, and I'd occasionally skim the CB Radio column, but it didn't have that much interest for me.

Ironically enough, I found out much later that the CB Radio craze of the 70s and 80s led to quite a few CB dedicated magazines across the globe.

Yes, even with CB Radio, sex sells.
From CB Action magazine out of Australia.

And in the UK, too.
From CB World magazine out of the UK.

Somebody alert the French that
sex sells CB magazines! From France CB
magazine, from... well, you know where.

Despite my history with radio as a hobby, I hadn't been that interested in trying out CB radio much over the years. I mean, I did own one for a while when I was "given" a cheap model as part of a yard sale purchase of a scanner radio, but I believe I gave it away to an electronics recycling event years ago.# It's just that CB radio does have its share of cranks and misfits and racists on the air, and despite that there's the perception that CB is an "old" technology and "nobody uses it" anymore.

Uh, yeah, about that latter part...

From a Loves Truck Stop in Indiana
in September 2024.

Loves is one of the places that I stop at while driving on the highway because I know I can usually find a clean restroom and a decent cup of coffee. So when I was inside, grabbing a drink, I saw some Cobra CB radios for sale and I quickly snapped that pic you see above. 

So if Loves considered CB radios important enough to truck drivers that they continue to stock them at their numerous stores throughout the country, then it's not so obsolete as I thought. 

Another thing happened over the past year that caught my attention was Hurricane Helene in the Fall of 2024. When the remnants of Helene hit the interior of the US, parts of the Appalachian Mountains centering around western North Carolina found themselves without power for well over a couple of weeks. In those situations, cell phones are useless without an active tower network, so it fell to CB radio and amateur radio to provide communications. I kept up with how things were progressing over that month, and I have to admit I was impressed by the response provided by both groups of radio operators (with some overlap between the two, to be honest).

With that knowledge out there, I began keeping an eye on YouTube for people promoting CB radio as a hobby. Again, there are the cranks and misfits out there, but there are plenty of people who keep the hobby alive. A lot of them are amateur radio operators (colloquially known as 'hams') who originally came from CB radio and still keep up with what's going on in CB.

I also found a recording of an actual LP made to explain how CB Radio worked:

Because that's what you did in the 70s to explain things

to people: you made a record of it.

While I'm not going to go out of my way to acquire a CB radio (at least not at the moment), I'll be keeping my eyes open if a used one comes my way. There's plenty of old radios around, so you never know what might appear at a local yard sale. And besides, an older radio could be yet another project for me to work on in my retirement years.

So no, I don't have a CB radio at the moment, but I think that'll change in the next year or two.

*True story: I was assigned in high school to read John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, and the references of "cat houses" in the novel left me all confused. I finally asked in class just what the hell a cat house was, and boy did the class laugh at that one. (It's slang for a house of prostitution, if you don't know.) In my defense I knew I could never ask my parents, because they'd just get all offended or something. And yes, I have asked innocent questions about that sort of thing before and had it all blow up out of proportion, so I learned to simply not bring it up.

**Yes, the movie was based on the song and came out a couple of years after the song.

***The shoes I was forced to wear for school were Buster Browns. Damn, I hated those things. Sure, gym shoes weren't allowed, but surely my parents could have chosen something less dorky looking that those things.

****I had to get a Sears branded stereo that wasn't very good, but at least it did play cassettes. For a while I don't think they wanted me to get even a cassette player. Given that I played a TON of Heavy Metal in the car that I knew they wouldn't have approved of, they probably didn't want that cassette player.

*****I wasn't allowed to see R-rated movies, despite my ability to watch them on cable television all the time, until I went and saw Platoon with some friends (and yes, I was 17 at the time, so I was "legal"). As a college classmate once said, "Red needs to get out from under his parents' thumb."

#I tried hunting for it for this post, but no dice, so I figured it's long gone. If I stumble on it later, I'll provide an update.

#Blaugust2025