Leisure: The Bleatniks

Strolling down 48th Street in Manhattan one afternoon last week, a visiting Frenchwoman felt a light tap on her arm. “Lady,” said a frowzy, spiritless panhandler, “c’n ya lemmee have a quarter to buy my little boy some milk?” As the woman reached into her purse, the city’s street sounds suddenly receded, and she heard the blare of a rock-‘n’-roll tune. She glanced around, at length found the source of the music: the panhandler was carrying a small transistor radio. The Frenchwoman snapped shut her purse and marched on.

All over the U.S., a new order of restless American stalks city and countryside carrying tiny transistors. He can’t stand silence. With his gadget turned up full-blast, the bleatnik goes about his pursuits with ear and mind cocked to sportscasts, disk-jockeywockey and what passes for pop music. He plods along, swinging his radio like an attaché case, or stuffs it into his shirt pocket, while the unrelenting blabber transists him like exhaust fumes. If he is using an earpiece receiver, identification may be more difficult, but there are certain telltale signs, as there are of hopheads and alcoholics: a faraway look of rapture, or just a plain, vacant stare.

In a Manhole. The increase of people hooked on sound matches the steep curve of radio sales. Buyers snatched up a few thousand portable transistor sets when they first hit the market in late 1954; last year, including Japanese-made sets that brought the prices down to well under $10, unit sales rose to a record 8,500,000. Like other addicts, the bleatniks are ingenious in their devotion to their pastime. They attend baseball games, trusty radio in hand, and tune in on the sportscaster to be certain that the announcer sees what the bleacherite sees; sometimes the fan tunes in a second ball game and, by concentrating hard, follows both at once, even if no one else can. With his built-in portable background music, a lonely boy can entice and entertain a girl without need for conversation, and when the romance dies, there is still the transistor for company.

Near Milk Street in Boston, a fruit peddler keeps his little radio nestled among the purple plums, and startled passers-by always pause to stare at the singing fruit. Small boys on bicycles churn along the roads with radios topped with long whip antennas (they used to carry fishing rods). On a downtown Dallas street recently, pedestrians arched their brows at an open manhole from which floated the ball-game scores. Chinese listeners in San Francisco may soon—if the electronic wrinkles are ironed out—watch the video version of Gunsmoke while their radios blast out a Cantonese translation, courtesy of a local radio station. “Grab a hunk of sky,” mouths Marshal Matt Dillon from the TV screen. “Ghur sao chiu tin” rasps radio’s Cantonese cowpoke.

At the Hollywood Bowl, while the symphony orchestra plays live, a man watches transfixed as he listens to the fights over his earpieces. In drive-in movies, canny audiences follow the picture and their favorite disk jockey simultaneously, presumably liking neither well enough to concentrate on it.

Station Identification. When Nikita Khrushchev attended a Hollywood luncheon last year, some bored stars tuned him out and their transistors in. In Miami, the owner of a Jaguar sports car has a transistor radio with two earplugs. Driving fast, the traffic, the wind and the engine block out his car radio, but he and his girl friend can make music together on the portable earphones. Small children have been known to sneak their little radios into bed with them (after stuffing them into their Teddy bears), plug in their earphones and listen away, with mommy and daddy none the wiser; at breakfast time, the red-eyed little tykes come to the table snapping their fingers and lisping Tossin’ and Turnin’.

What bugs these battery-driven hopheads? A plague of monophobia? A desperate search for (station) identification? In keeping with the professional tradition that no analysis is worth anything unless it overanalyzes, one authority suggests that bleatnikism goes much deeper than the inner ear canal. Says University of Illinois Sociology Professor Peter Klassen: the transistor radio offers an “appeal to bodily comfort which is related to the desire to go back to the womb, the mother and the breast. It would be interesting to study the idea that these transistor bearers might have been bottle-fed babies rather than breast-fed babies, and that the physical link of the earplug might be reminiscent to them of a maternal form of comfort, a search for a mother image.”

All this might surprise the busy businessman in Dallas who is hard of hearing. His associates who get no response from him think that his hearing aid is turned off. Not so. He has his transistor radio on, and he is tuned in on his mother image —or else the Dallas News stock-market reports.