High-tech mystery is solved

OK. Let's start at the beginning.

A few years ago we remodeled the kitchen of our half-century-old house. Before the renovation, the kitchen had its original pink metal cabinets and linoleum on the floor that defied description.

The new kitchen, of course, got all the modern conveniences: new appliances, light switches that turned things on and off, electrical outlets, oodles of countertop space and a breakfast bar under the window that overlooks our backyard secret garden with two bird feeders.

The new stove has electronic gadgets we have yet to figure out, but it works. And it has a digital clock that requires resetting for the twice-a-year time changes and whenever the power flickers in our neighborhood, which is far too frequently.

Right above the stove is a microwave, which also has a digital clock that requires resetting ... .

If we had been that concerned about the location of the clocks that came with these appliances, we might have put one on one side of the kitchen and the other on the other side. But we weren't.

A few months ago, we acquired a fancy-dancy under-the-cabinet radio-CD player. It's very thin, and you hardly notice it, except for the digital clock that requires resetting ... .

For convenience and so as not to break the tradition of having all our kitchen clocks in pretty much the same place, we put the new radio-CD player-clock under the cabinet next to the microwave over the small bit of countertop between the stove and the refrigerator.

After installation, we decided to see if the CD player worked. Indeed it does.

We checked to see if the clock worked. Indeed it does.

And we turned on the radio to our favorite FM station, KRCU, to see if it worked. Indeed it does not.

You can hear the station, but not clearly. The reception is about as good as we got in the farmhouse over yonder on Killough Valley in the Ozarks before electricity. We never knew if the poor signal was because of the hills, a weak station or a low battery. Those were the days.

So, if you've been following along, what we wound up with in the Sullivan kitchen was three kitchen clocks all in the same general area, with one of the clocks attached to a pretty good CD player but no radio reception to speak of.

We're ordinary folks, my wife and I. We don't pretend to know anything about the world of electronics, except when you plug something in, it should work.

Thank goodness, then, that we were clever enough 35 years ago to have a firstborn son smart enough to graduate from MIT.

Our older son, who is home for a visit from Boston, where he is an avid listener to public radio stations, has solved the mystery of the hiss in the under-the-cabinet FM radio.

He got up the other morning and turned on the under-the-cabinet radio. The static was awful. He was hungry, so he opened the refrigerator door to get milk for his cereal. Miraculously, the radio static disappeared as long as the fridge door was open.

He showed me when I got home. He showed his mother. This, of course, is what we would expect from our MIT-educated son.

We asked: But why?

He didn't have a clue. Honest.

We unplugged the radio from the outlet shared by the fridge. End of static.

My wife marveled at the accidental discovery. Older son mentioned something about "That's the way beer was discovered too." He ought to know, with his MIT learning and all.

R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.