My first car was a 1964 Chevy Impala, two-door, black with red interior, bought for 200 bucks from a magazine researcher who’d kept it forever parked on the New York streets, leaving its chrome and sheet metal ringed with small dents. Still, from a distance, it looked “cherry,” as the grease monkeys used to say.
It was the 1984-85 school year, my last at Bridgehampton High. My older brother and I parked at the edge of a potato field and let the 283-cubic-inch small-block V-8 idle. Switching on the radio, we were stunned to find ourselves listening to a station out of Detroit.
A solar storm? A disruption in the earth’s electromagnetic field? Whatever, it was eerie, like something out of “Christine,” Stephen King’s demon car story. I’ve been a fan of AM radio ever since, from the gospel stations on cross-country road trips to Mets games with Howie Rose, that master of the play-by-play, still the only way I keep tabs on the Good Grief Nine.
So why did it take me so long to discover WRIV 1390 AM? Straight out of Riverhead, this station out-LNGs WLNG, “the Oldies Station,” “Since ’63,” “Big Signal,” and all the rest.
Actually, you can scratch that last one, which at least partly explains WRIV’s low-profile since, as far as I can tell, the end of Eisenhower’s first term. Unheard of for an AM station, you practically have to park beneath its downtown studios to pull it in.
As for the playlist, Eydie Gormé? Be still my heart. (No doubt she’ll come on right after the chirping “Wake up!” jingle.) I do sense a creeping predilection for Simon & Garfunkel, but that can be forgiven.
Enjoying “Happy, Happy Birthday Baby” (the Tune Weavers, 1957) over the station’s completely no-frills website the other day, I heard tell of a big band show at noon on Sunday.
My calendar is marked.