Scattered Childhood Memories #13: Raindrops & Radio Contests

During the summer of 1987 my mother spent her free time listening to the oldies radio station, trying to win a brand new car.

How it worked (as I remember it): You mailed in a postcard with your name and phone number, then tuned in to the station and listened... constantly. At home. In the car. Outside, with a battery-operated gadget. At any moment the DJs might call your name, and if they did, you had roughly 10 minutes to get to a phone, call the station, and claim your prize. The prize, as I recall, was a key. The key may or may not open the doors of a BRAND NEW CAR! I feel like you also got $100 cash, too, which to a 6-year-old sounded like a fortune.

My mother swears that my memory is false, that she never sent her name in, and that she probably only told me she had done so "to entertain me." But I know I'm right. Only because of how much she listened to that station that summer. Heaven forbid we be on the road when they called someone's name, because there were no cell phones, and you'd have find a pay phone. Sure, pay phones were on every other corner, but you'd also have to park, and... what if you had somewhere to be? Or what if someone else was in the phone booth? 

The songs I remember playing over and over that summer:

You Send Me by Sam Cooke (1958)

All I Have To Do Is Dream by the Everly Brothers (1958)

Dream Lover by Bobby Darin (1959)

Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head by Burt Bacharach and Hal David (1969)

Baby I Need Your Loving by the Four Tops (1964)

Goin' Out Of My Head by Little Anthony & the Imperials (1964)

Top Of The World by the Carpenters (1973)

You've Lost That Loving Feeling by the Righteous Brothers (1964)

I'm also pretty sure there were some Hermit's Hermits and Four Seasons in there.

I do wonder about the Carpenters song -- it's the only one from the 70s, and it seems a little odd that an Oldies station would play a song from just 14 years prior, but I'll leave it here anyway.

In the end, my mom didn't win a car. She didn't even win a key. But I lived in a state of anxiety that summer. What if they call her name while we're at church? What if they call her name while we're asleep? What if they've already called her name, and we MISSED IT?

And so it remains one of those mixed-up memories. 1987: a year of DuckTales and Care Bears and car rides full of crooning.