-- ---.---- Delta flight 403 cleared for runway 19 Right VFR approach.

What the?

-- ---.---- Roger American 602, contact control when you have the field in sight.

This sure isn't "alternative rock's home WHFS" coming through on my Walkman. It sounds like...

-- ---.---- Virgin 509 contact Dulles approach.

I'll be damned. Standing in my garage getting ready to go out on my daily bike ride I'd stumbled onto something amazing, something really cool. The dinky little Walkman I used to occupy my brain while doing mindless laps around the neighborhood was picking up Dulles International Airport air traffic control. To someone who loves aviation, it was sort of like unrolling the morning paper and having a diamond ring fall out.

Well, a scratched and tarnished diamond ring at any rate, because the reception wasn't all that grand. If this were a "real" radio and we didn't live less than two miles from the Dulles Airport concourse, I probably wouldn't be able to hear it at all. So occasionally I'd get completely clear exchanges, but most of the time I'd end up with:

-- ---.---- American flight 102 turn ~ ex-s live in Texas, that's why I'm ~ runway 19 ~Tennesseeeeee ~ (why is it always a country music station you end up with when you don't want a radio station at all? Do people who like country end up getting Nine Inch Nails when they least expect it?)

Well, really, what could I expect from a device that was "functioning" simply because the radio equivalent of an 800 pound gorilla was flinging poo at it from three feet away? Fortunately I knew exactly what my "weapon of choice" was going to be to polish that diamond right up.

02 156.4500 This is 2123, 10-86
02 156.4500 Roger 2123 now showing you 10-86 at 13:45

"Paw-paw!! What is that?!?"

I remember it as being summer, by later events probably 1979 or 1980. I'd been drug to yet another dinner at grandma's ("I don't like visiting her," I recall saying, "she keeps trying to kiss me and she calls it 'sugar'. It's gross!" Ah, to be 11 again...) fully expecting the evening to devolve into the standard "let's see how we can get Scott in trouble this time" game my younger brother Jeff always enjoyed whenever he got particularly bored and an adult was nearby. If I can just find a good book and a room with a lock on it...

05 150.4550 mmmmBEEEEEmmm
05 150.4550 Engine 65 respond to a pulled fire alarm 153 Bowles avenue.
05 150.4550 Engine 65 roger.

It was about the size of a clock radio, had a two-foot "whip" style antenna sticking out of it like a chrome lightning bolt, and was (for the time) absolutely encrusted with switches and flashing lights. Let me tell you, to a kid who thought his Star Wars walkie-talkie was the most amazing thing on the planet, this gizmo was more incredible than Pamela Anderson's boobs (when you're 11 your priorities are different. Plus Pam was only about five at that point. Gah.)

"It's a police scanner," my grandpa said with ill-disguised glee, "you can listen to all the fire and police stations in the area with it."

"It's noisy and it keeps me up at night. I'm sorry he ever saw the thing." My grandmother, obviously, had never taken "gadget appreciation 101" in school.

But I had, and my brother had, and, amazingly, so had my mom. We all sat in front of the thing, captivated, as it occasionally burped out one astounding announcement after another.

"Goddamn you Scott Johnson, you lay a finger on this thing and so help me I'll beat your ass!"

Fast forward to Christmas of the next year. We all did pretty well, but it was my mom who'd hit the jackpot. Under the tree with her name on it was none other than a Bearcat 210 police scanner, courtesy of my granddad. What made this scanner so tempting to me was it was one of the first programmable scanners. You didn't deal with crystals or switches or any of that, you simply punched buttons and BINGO, off it went. You could even search for signals!

And there, as they say, lay the rub. In an age when you can program a washing machine for specific laundry ("No, Dave, I'm sorry. I'm afraid I can't open the door for your underwear.") it's hard to imagine anyone actually being afraid of a programmable device, but that's what my parents were around this thing. They were both patently convinced one wrong keypunch and it would simply implode, the melted remains busily burning their way to China.

"But mommmmm" 's wouldn't work either. This thing was expensive, probably $350 (when you could buy a paperback book for $2 and a double-album for $12). I couldn't sneak a tinker in either. Jeff knew a gold-plated opportunity to get big brother in trouble when he saw it, and fairly set up camp next to the thing whenever we were left alone with it. So there it sat, glowing lights whizzing by, the occasional transmission coming through it, bright blue and yellow labeled buttons sitting in the open, tragically unused for fear of "messing it up."

14 156.0505 Attention all units, be on the lookout for a white and gold 1985 Pontiac Trans Am. Suspect is believed to be involved in an assault and homicide at 1452 White Oak Street. Driver is believed to be Bud D. Driver should be considered armed and dangerous.

"Scott... wake up."

"Wha? Jesus Christ mom, I just graduated High School. I don't need to wake up this early anymore!"

"Valerie's dead."

"What?!?"

"Valerie's dead. Her dad got drunk and decided he was going to get back together with her mom. Valerie got between them and got hit with something. She's dead."

"How'd you hear about this?!?"

Owning a police scanner means you're almost always the first civilian to learn about a crime. That's part of the fun of it. It's like a 24x7 COPS program, live. You are always ahead of the media on local stories.

Sometimes, though, you forget these are real things happening to real people. If you live in a big enough metropolitan area, it might always remain not-quite-fiction. Every once in awhile though, if you're unlucky enough, it all comes rushing at you like a driverless wheat thresher.

13 154.3505 Ambulance unit 43 to dispatch. Be advised we probably have one DOA on board. The mother looks like she'll at least make it to the hospital
13 154.3505 Copy 43.

1986. Our scanner had been stashed in a closet long ago, a victim of one of the spectacular thunderstorms that regularly trundled through the area. My grandfather, however, had taken the opportunity to upgrade his old analog system with a top-of-the-line digital, complete with the soon-to-be-outlawed ability to listen in on cell phone calls. Always the true believer, he'd learned to sleep with an earplug. Criminals don't work 9-5 you know. Drove my grandmother nuts. Most of the time. Sometimes, though, it paid off.

So that's how I learned Valerie D, someone who graduated High School with me, someone who was 18 just like me, someone who grew up with me, was dead. We weren't close friends. I didn't have close friends back then. But she was definitely someone I could count on to, say, help with homework or share a band practice room with. Her clock stopped that night, violently smashed by a drunk too stupid to understand. Mine has ticked on to this day, and I wonder at it still.

28 158.5755 You'll need to load 4000 pounds on B14

E-bay is a wonderful thing, but can bite the unwary. There absolutely are scanners ten times as powerful as that old Bearcat that can easily fit in my pocket. Unfortunately, or perhaps predictably, the first one I snagged gets every single channel someone would want.

Except airplanes.

But, living as close as we do to Dulles, while I'm waiting on this scanner to sell and my "new" (thoroughly researched) scanner to arrive, there's plenty of non-airplane airport traffic to listen to. Most colorful are the fuelers, who seem like an extremely practical bunch always getting badgered by airlines and pilots who need a babysitter more than a gas guy.

28 158.5755 Four thousand pounds?!? Where are they going?
28 158.5755 Says here they're going to Miami.
28 158.5755 How are they supposed to make Miami with just 4000 pounds?
28 158.5755 Not our problem 32. The man wants 4000, he gets 4000.
28 158.5755 [chuckles] Remind me not to fly [deleted] any time soon.
28 158.5755 Roger that 32.

People still roll their eyes at me when I say I have a scanner. What in the early 80s was the piece of electronics to have seems now to be a holdover from the days of leg warmers and feathered hair. It's only when I put on the headphones and start repeating the stats of an ambulance run, noting the difficulty hearing it over the sirens, that they start to figure it out.

Most of all, to me scanners are a tool for understanding. You never really appreciate how busy cops or fire fighters or EMTs are until you hear them get called out every five minutes of every hour, 24 hours a day. You never really understand how something as simple as five cases of bottled water can delay a hundred and fifty people from reaching their destination. Most of all, you don't quite realize how fascinating it is to hear people go about their daily lives, never once realizing someone is "listening in".