Jackson Armstrong won’t be right back.  He’s dead at 63.  I got the news just after noon today.  Childhood was 35 years ago for me but it dies only piece-by-piece.  Jackson Armstrong was the night-side disc jockey at WKBW-Radio in Buffalo.  A long time ago during the early 1970s, when I was a boy riding in the back seat of my dad’s Dodge and you could listen on cold winter nights to Armstrong.  There would be a glow on the instrument panel of the car and the voice of Armstrong somewhere an hour away in the darkness of Western New York.  He was having a good time those cold and bleak winter nights.  Legend has it that he got the job by winning a playoff against Doug Tracht.  Tracht later became known as The Greaseman and gained his own infamy.

 

Then one night Armstrong was gone.  It’s radio.  The actors pack and move to the next gig.  Years later I heard Jackson Armstrong was in L.A.  Today I heard his obituary spoken by Doug Limerick or Paul Harvey, Jr. or another one of the names from the past.

 

So many have gone to the next stage since those cold winter nights when I was a boy.  My grandfather Colley died one of those cold winter evenings I listened to Armstrong.  March, I believe, 1972.  My grandmothers died many years later and my parents are now gone along with a growing list of personal friends.  It was cold and dark and snowy all those many years ago but I was surrounded by the comfort of the familiar.  The radio was and is a constant.  Each year I read radio’s obituary and yet it endures.  It’s as reliable as the sun rises and sun sets.  You simply flip a switch and there are voices.  Some are close but more often than not these voices are far away.  The best talk only with me while also talking only with you.

 

It’s what caused me to forego law school and teaching and a government job or two.  It was caused by the nights spent on the roof of my cousin’s sugar shack.  Cloudless and cold autumn in Western New York can be little but barren.  One night I was on the roof with Sean Doyle and Kevin Donavan and someone had a radio and we tuned in WNBC and we lied on our backs against the roof and stared at the stars and knew we weren’t alone.  In the vastness of the universe there was isolation and yet redemption.  There was a voice, 8 hours away, talking with us.  The voices I would often hear at night from Chicago, St. Louis, Montreal, Boston, Cleveland and Philadelphia.  All of these voices and so many like Jackson Armstrong sharing a personal moment from so many places I wouldn’t ever see. 

 

Life is brief and usually hard and it brings its share of grief.  Thursday I will go to work and I’ll open a microphone and I’ll share my story.  It’s what I do and from as long ago as I can remember it’s all I ever wanted from life.  To touch someone on a chilly autumn night as they gaze at the stars or as they huddle for warmth in the backseat of a car, bathed in the glow of an instrument panel, while cold wind and snow howl in every direction.   It’s the voice that reassures there is more and that our dark nights will bring dawn.  A metaphor for all that we believe and hope will be there for us when there are no longer any new gigs.

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