By Gregory Clark, April 18, 1925.
The Radio Joneses are going to move again.
(We all call them the Radio Joneses. You ought to see their roof. Last fall, so long as the good weather lasted, they had their loud squeaker out on the back balcony to give all and sundry the benefit of the entire static of the district. Mrs. Jones has even given up bridge. Nothing is more horrible than when a wife also becomes a radio bug.)
The Joneses have moved every May since 1919, when Jones, burying his uniform1 in his parent’s garden, married her and they moved into their first apartment in a great King street apartment house.
A first apartment is always an experiment. Nobody expects them to stay put. The Joneses had decided to move at the end of their first month.
“You’ve no idea,” said Mrs. Jones, then a slip of a bride, “of the racket and goings on in this place. All hours of the night. The queerest people. I don’t like Snooks” – (Radio Jones himself) – “to be in an atmosphere like this. On our floor, some business girls…”
So they moved to a very quiet eight-family apartment up in the Spadina district in May, 1920. And it looked as if they were going to stay. But shortly after Christmas, we had them to tea.
“Really,” said Mrs. Radio, then not quite so slippy, “the deadliest atmosphere in that place. I don’t know one person in the place. They glower at you, and swish by in the halls without so much as a good morning. And the other night we had Fred and his wife and Jean and her husband in for a little evening, and would you believe it, the man down below us telephoned up to say that it was one o’clock! No, sir! We’re going get out of that tomb.”
And they did. May, 1921, they moved to a duplex on the Hill. And there Radio Junior was born.
“A duplex is all right for a honeymoon,” said Mrs. Jones, along about February. “But with a baby in the house, you need a house.”
So May, 1922, found them moving to a small six-roomed house, not counting the cellar, in the St. Clair district.
And there Junior learned to walk and knock things about, and dig the yard up and break the furnace chains and almost break his little neck on the stairs. Mrs. Jones had lost every vestige of her slippiness by that time, and she found the stairs very trying and the laundry tubs too low, and it was fifteen minutes, her time, to the street cars and the shops on St. Clair.
“Really,” she panted, in March, 1923, “we must get something more central. If old Funny Face” – (formerly Snooks) – “can’t manage to get a car, then I want to be within five minutes. of somewhere, anyway, somehow.”
So they moved to a seven-roomed house in the west end within one block of the cars.
Junior was now able to be out on his own two fat little legs.
“A child is an awful responsibility,” said Mrs. Jones. “I had no idea. Two doors away is a family of six kids, and one of them has always got something, whooping cough, measles, pink eye. I live in terror. When Junior is on the verandah, I can’t keep those kids away. They love him, the dear wee fellow. But I am in terror. I just stand at the door and listen for whoops or croups or mumps and things. I’d like to get away to some district where there aren’t so many children. A street where there is just one other little child besides Junior, for him to play with, for I believe a child should have companions. But sometimes this place is just like a schoolyard.”
Thus, last year, they did move. They found a street of brides. A row of new houses in which, as yet, there is not even one baby. They bought Junior a pup.
And then they got the radio bug. Bridegrooms seem to go in for radio. Anyway, it was seeing the aerials on the houses all up and down the street and the vision, through roseate downstairs windows2 in the evenings, of happy couples bending over mysterious boxes that induced the Joneses to investigate. And in a month they were bugs.
“Half these fellows,” said Jones, indignantly, “have little four point four sets that ruin the air for hours every night.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Radio Jones, the other evening, “we are going out to a dear little bungalow near Islington, and, do you know, there is hardly an aerial to be seen from the upstairs window. And furthermore, it is just like the country, and the country, I think, is so good for children.”
And she blushed prettily.
You will note she said children.
We know the 1926 excuse already.
Editor’s Notes: Radio was still fairly new in 1925, so some people became obsessed with it.
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