CB Heebies

CB Heebies
March 7, 1998

Before the Internet became a household word, C.W. McCall made alternate meanings for words like "smokey" and "beaver" famous. Before email addresses, there were CB handles. Before the prominence of cellular phones and laptops, there were mobile units. Before web site URLs, there were FCC call letters.

My parents were heavily involved in the CB craze when I was 13. My mother drove long distances and thus, was the first of the family to "break" in. She chose the handle of Juicy Fruit (which I thought was peculiar, since she didn't chew gum). My father became Willy Wonka. We then had to have handles that went along this theme. My pre-teen brother went by the handle of TootsiePop (years before the name "Tootsie" became forever linked to Dustin Hoffman in drag) and I chose LifeSaver, since I had just earned CPR certification that year in 8th grade. Maybe Chunky would be more appropriate for me nowadays. :-) Our home base was The Candy Factory, and our official call letters issued to us by the FCC were KAWW-1900. The license was good for 4 years and cost 5 bucks, if I remember correctly.

CB setups could be complicated propositions. You got yourself a great big antennae and put it on the roof of your house. My parents went hog-wild and bought 2. The second antennae (called a MoonRaker by the company) had a motor which you could control the direction it was facing, thus bringing the signal you wanted in more strongly (hopefully). The house looked especially goofy, as if our home doubled as a makeshift control tower at some Green-Acres-esque tiny rural airport. Suddenly, my vocabulary contained terms like coax, frequency, TVI, squelch, RF Gain, and noise level.

Then again, CB radios were quite simple. There was sideband, in which you could get long distances. My mother had postcards from people she'd communicated with via sideband. I don't remember any places, but I'm sure there was at least one postcard from a place like Jamaica or The Virgin Islands. I could be wrong, but the point is that she didn't know how it worked and neither did I. We just turned a dial and pressed a button and bingo - sideband. The biggest CB upgrade was expanding from 23 channels to 40. No IRQ conflicts, no compatibility problems, no viruses, no spam, no bugs, no software patches, no MSIE 4.0, no "x+kvqMQ" in your transmission. You just keyed up the mike and spoke.

Suddenly there were all these new people in our lives, Hockey Mom and Hockey Dad, Big Star, Rag Bag, Chicken Soup (who was not Jewish, but Hispanic), Hot Coffee, Little Cherokee, King and Crazy Quilter. My dad was an early riser, but my mom stayed up many a late night on the CB to talk to all these people. It was the precursor to AOL chatrooms. If you were so inclined, you could also send the equivalent of an IM by calling somebody on the phone while they were on the CB. My parents and their new friends formed a group and called themselves The Jefferson Squawkers, meeting on the airwaves on channel 11, and on Sunday mornings for coffee and bullshit at the Mountainside Diner in Jefferson Township.

There was a code of etiquette back then regarding airtime, which actually worked surprisingly well. If you heard somebody request a break in the channel (i.e. "breaker") you acknowledged the break by saying something like "You're acknowledged, break". You tried to wrap up your conversation so the other person could get through. If somebody called for a quickie break, you let them through so they could get a brief message to somebody, mainly "give me a landline" (phone call) or to meet on such-and-such channel. Abuse the quickie break and they might ignore you next time. A mobile break was also one that you let in as soon as you could, since that indicated that they were calling from a mobile unit which was usually a car, not a walkie-talkie, as they were restricted to channel 14. And you did not ever go onto channel 19 with a base unit, unless you were specifically looking for another mobile who may have been on that channel. Once you contacted that person, you immediately went to another channel. Channel 19 was for the truckers, and other travelers looking for road condition reports, (including where the smokeys were, of course) so you had to keep that channel clear.

On the whole, everybody I regularly heard on the CB observed the codes of conduct. The system worked very smoothly. Of course, there were people who just breezed onto the airwaves and didn't observe the rules. The end result was those nights turning into a pissing contest over who had the most power, one person keyed up over the other and nobody could talk to anybody. Which brings to mind another interesting thing I remember about CB days. Piss somebody off, and the flaming could get creative, since you weren't supposed to use obscenities on the air, and most people I heard were very careful about this, since you never knew when Uncle Charlie (the FCC) was listening.

I had a love/hate relationship with the CB. I loved going on the air, but hated the way it sliced through the signal of my favorite radio station, WABC. I've mentioned it before, but if it weren't for the CB craze, I might be listening to WPLJ or Z-100 right now, or perhaps the latest album by Michael Bolton, Celine Dion, or the Spice Girls. It wasn't until I changed to FM that I discovered artists like Elvis Costello, Talking Heads, Dire Straits, and even the plethora of Classic Rock artists like Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Deep Purple, Cream, The Grateful Dead, etc.

We can make more comparisons between the Internet and the CB, but the future may well bring some other form of communication that will make Internet access look like two tin cans and a string. The future trend followers may scoff at us for worrying about hard drive space, RAM, bandwidth, browser wars, and junk email. They may laugh at email addresses like HotBabe908, John316, riotgrrl, GothQueen, Number6, NYMETSFAN, and WharfRat, much the same way we mirthfully reminisce at the old CB lingo today.

Now, if you'll excuse me, good buddies, I gotta go take a 10-100. This is Lifesaver at The Candy Factory, KAWW-1900, off the key and on the side. Go ahead, breaker.

--Rich K