For obvious reasons, the 5-cent stamp honoring “Amateur Radio” that is today’s #stampoftheday made me think of the “Brooklyn Pirate Radio Sound Map,” an amazing website curated by David Goren, my talented brother-in-law.
An award-winning radio engineer, Goren has been tracking these stations since the mid-1990s. In July 2018, he launched the sound map, which now has over 250 sound clips with filtering by music, language, nationality and religious content. The site has been featured in a New Yorker “Talk of the Town” article, a KCRW podcast, and many other venues. And last week Goren was informed that his project is now a partner of the Library of Congress’ Radio Preservation Task Force, a group that documents, collects, preserves, and encourages the use of materials related to the history of radio.
As the pirate radio website explains: “As the workday unwinds across the sprawling West Indian enclaves of Flatbush and East Flatbush, homegrown unlicensed radio stations begin to switch on. Using names like Irie Storm, Boom Station, Radio Gospel Train and Wei-Vybz, these stations are often labeled ‘pirates’ for the way they commandeer occupied radio frequencies…From improvised studios hidden behind storefronts, in houses of worship and down the stairs in bodega basements, live DJ’s spin Reggae, Soca, Konpas, Caribbean Gospel and more. Pastors preach to the faithful and seek to reach lost souls.” This combination of “very local programming [combined] with an often shaky grasp of the technical art of broadcasting” produces, the website notes, “a raucous, chaotic counterpoint to the steadfast blandness and predictability of corporate-owned, commercial radio.”
Technically, the stations, which broadcast from “secretly placed transmitters scattered around Brooklyn,” are illegal. But, the website also explains, “for over twenty years, several factors have converged to allow for a critical mass of stations to occupy the airwaves in mostly urban pockets. The soaring costs of legal airtime, easy access to inexpensive transmitters, and cuts to the FCC enforcement budget created an opening for a high level of continuous activity.”
The U.S. Post Office Department, of course, wasn’t honoring “pirate” radio stations when it issued this stamp. Rather, it was honoring the 50th anniversary of the founding of the American Radio Relay League, which began in April 1914 after Hiram Percy Maxim of Hartford, an amateur radio operator, was unable to send a message to a friend 30 miles away in Springfield, MA. This give him the idea of creating an organized relay system for amateur radio operators. Within a few months, he and his friends established a network of more than 230 operators. The league grew rapidly and at its peak, it had more than 250,000 members. (It’s estimated that it currently has about 150,000 members.)
While the stamp didn’t endorse pirate radio stations, I’ve been looking forward to the day I could use the stamp to write about David and his work. This was true even though I found four other stamps also issued on December 15 that could have been today’s #stampoftheday. These were a 1936 stamp picturing John Paul Jones and John Barry (both naval heroes from the Revolutionary War); a 1937 stamp honoring the U.S. Virgin Islands; a 1956 stamp marking the importance of children in promoting world peace; and a 1960 stamp picturing Echo I, a reflective, metallicized “balloon satellite” placed in low orbit in August 1960 that made it possible to transmit radio communications over longer distance.
I believe you can make a case (sometimes a tenuous one) that each of these stamps also connects to his work. The most obvious connection is with the Echo I stamp, which, after all, also is about radio communications. So, I’ve decided to make it today’s second #stampoftheday.
The Virgin Islands stamp arguably connects because the Brooklyn stations (and similar ones found in other cities that are pirate radio hotspots, such as Boston and Miami), are particularly important for people from the Caribbean.
The naval heroes stamp (tenuously) connects to Goren’s work because that stamp is about our revolution while the pirate stations, as Goren notes, have often been important “independent sources of information” for people who fled from, and are helping with the fight against, repressive regimes, such as Haiti under both Papa Doc and Baby Doc Duvalier.
And the pirate stations are connected to children and world peace stamp because the stations often provide a source of up-to-date information on immigration issues that are particularly important to the many undocumented young people in Brooklyn. Moreover, the stations show how these communities can foster peace by working together.
In the New Yorker piece, for example, “a Jamaican sounding” broadcaster says: “It’s Mount Zion, the city of a king. To all my Jewish people out there in Crown Heights, vus machst du? Everything is good, oh yeah! Baruch Hashem!”
“That’s ‘Bless the Lord’ in Hebrew,” Goren tells the reporter. “…It’s one of the wonders of New York. [It’s] Like going into a Jewish [grocery] store, where the African-American guy behind the counter is speaking Yiddish to the little old ladies.”
So, perhaps the pirate radio scene is closer to Hiram Percy Maxim’s vision than I first believed. Maxim was trying to connect with a friend in Springfield who was 30 miles away. The pirate stations, Goren shows, are connecting people who may be closer physically but are still, in many ways, far apart and, like all of us, in need of stronger connections.
Be well, stay safe, provide a “chaotic counterpoint to the steadfast blandness and predictability” of corporate life, fight for justice, and work for peace.