This is the Mary Palace. I'm Nate Demetow.

Now I have read the story at the center of this story a number of different ways.

The setting changes, the timing is always a little unclear.

The main character is the same but everyone else in it is sort of malleable.

Sometimes they're teenagers, sometimes they're adults,

sometimes their ages don't factor in in any substantive way.

But what those people do, how they behave, and what that behavior means to the main character,

is constant. It is the point. Now this isn't one of the stories where the telling changes

because there are different people with differing accounts. It is in a Roshmont story or the

New Testament for that matter. It's one of those stories where one guy told the story repeatedly

to make the same point. And all the specifics of setting and character started to get fuzzy.

And any rough edges and complications got smoothed out as it found its most pleasing,

most universally appealing form. That one guy is Todd Stores,

whose dad bought him a kit to build his own radio in 1931 when radio was still new and

to Todd, straightening the wire that poked out of a cigar box just so until voices from distant

lands came into the small speaker he held to his ear. It felt like magic.

He was a teenage ham radio enthusiast. Join the Army signal corps as soon as he finished high school

to spend the last couple of years of World War II stateside. And by 25, determined to be a

radio man, got a job at a modest station in the modest town of Hutchinson, Kansas.

The kind of operation where you did everything that needed to be done. He sold ads. He read the news

at noon. He soldered wires that needed soldering. He swept floors that needed sweeping. He lucked up

on his way out. Long hours, low pay, and he loved it. And then his dad bought a radio station for

...