Here's a little great radio history

Just a few months before I left the Berkshires and moved to Minnesota, a freak October snowstorm hit The Great Northwest and Minnesotans haven't shut up about it since.

I guess I can relate a little bit. It was was October 1986 when a blizzard unexpectedly hit the Berkshires, knocking out power and stranding people for days.

Somehow, with no emergency generator, WSBS in Great Barrington was the only radio station to stay on the air for the duration.  We were a daytimer then with authority to broadcast at a ridiculous 3.9 watts at night, which would usually carry the signal all the way to the KMart across the street.

But when all the power was out, it carried quite a distance.

From about 7 in the morning on Sunday to about midnight or 1 a.m. on Monday, we stayed on the air to talk about it.

And, for the most part, unlike Minnesotans, that was the end of it.

Until today when I was processing some old reel-to-reel tapes that I had digitized and, to my surprise, one hour of the broadcast was one of the files that came back.

This was probably around noon or so, and includes the segment where NBC's Gene Shalit, stuck at his second home in Stockbridge, called.

Behold,   radio the way it once was. Live reports of the end of the town locust tree, and details of the winner of the person to correctly predict the first freeze of the year.

God, it was great!

Bob Collins 3 · WSBS Blizzard Coverage 1986

I wrote more about this some years ago.

My family -- Carolie and two-year old Sean (Carolie had yet to give birth to Patrick) -- were somewhere, but I didn't know where. Carolie is the daughter of a radio guy; she knew I had a job to do and she'd figure out how to survive. They huddled with some neighbors who had a wood stove.

It was 10 or 11 O'clock at night and the Berkshires were scared. And then, a power company truck came by the state highway out front, then another, and another, and another. They kept coming. The rest of Massachusetts had sent us some help. So I told southern Berkshire County that help was here.

As midnight approached, people were still calling. When they weren't, I pulled out the Old Farmer's Almanac and began reading stories. Finally, around 1 a.m., the Berkshires were asleep, and I signed the station off the air.

I miss radio. But I also miss the evidence that we were all once there. Finding this archive was a treasure.