THE BODACIOUS NEW WORLD OF C.B.

This cotton-picker name of Red Vine from the Dirty Side was rolling a pregnant skate through Watergate town other day when he passed the home twenty of lady breaker First Mama. There was no city kitty so, mercysakes, Red hammered off, keyed his rig and called "Breaker one-niner for KUY-9532. "Negative copy. That foxy lady wasn 't hanging out, didn 't have her ears on. Good buddy told her anyway, "You truck 'em easy now, Apple Betty. Eighty-eights and ten, roger and out."

To the owners of 15 million Citizens Band radio sets, and some of the millions more who have become familiar with CB language from records and TV shows, the message was loud and clear: a nontrucker from New York City, whose CB nickname is Red Vine, was driving his Volkswagen through Washington when he passed the White House, home of fellow CB-Owner Betty Ford, whose radionym is First Mama (TIME, May 3). There were no cops around, so he slowed down and tried to reach her on his set, using her FCC-issued call number, but got no response. The attractive First Lady was not monitoring her set,* so Red Vine reminded her to drive safely, wished her love and kisses and signed off.

The cryptic, demotic jargon--and the Arkahoma accent in which it is invariably delivered no matter where in the U.S.--may seem outlandish to many. If so, they had better hang easy and adjust to it. From 8 to 10 million more CB sets will be sold in 1976, which with extra equipment could amount to some $2.5 billion worth--nearly as much as total sales of TV sets. One of the biggest manufacturers, Hy-Gain Electronics Corp. (maker of Betty Ford's rig), reported that 1976 first-quarter sales quintupled those for the same period in 1975. A $2.95 paperback CB dictionary has sold more than a quarter of a million copies. "CB Land," as enthusiasts call it, is served by a babel of newspapers, magazines, thousands of clubs and a lobby in Washington. The cult's most celebrated recent convert after Betty Ford is Snoopy, who has found solace with CB in the Peanuts strip.

Three of the biggest U.S. electronics manufacturers decided this year to enter the lucrative market for what the song The White Knight described as "that Japanese toy, that trucker's joy." Most 1976 American cars can be bought with the sets installed; nearly half of all trucks in the U.S. are CB-equipped. The cost is relatively low--from about $90 to $350 for a serviceable set and antenna--and CB is simple to install in a truck, car or boat, drawing its power from the vehicle's battery. The same units can be plugged in at home with inexpensive DC inverters to cut house voltage down to the 12 volts needed to go on the air. Portable units cost even less. The FCC estimates that in time there will be 60 million licensed CB sets in operation. As one industry executive says, "The more people are on the air, the more people want to join them on the air."

Without doubt, simple, low cost, ubiquitous radio conversation represents the biggest explosion of communications since the invention of the telephone. Its cultural impact may not be as pervasive as television's, but in an odd way, it is a creative one. TV is, after all, a nonparticipant pastime. CB radio, by contrast, is a two-way medium that enables everyman to write his own script. It has not only nourished a proliferating vocabulary that threatens to outdate any dictionary of American slang within months; as well, it catalyzes an egalitarian, anti-authoritarian philosophy that has never been expressed in this fashion before. In the TV series Movin' On, hit records like C.W. McCall's Convoy (which sold 5 million copies and is to be made into a film) and the movie White Line Fever --all of them CB oriented--the good guys v. the cops is a basic theme.

Such considerations were far from the collective mind of the FCC in 1945, when it set aside a sliver of the broadcast spectrum for the noncommercial use of ordinary citizens such as hunters, boaters, construction teams and farmers ranging far from homes and telephones. The first CB license was not granted until 1947. In the next quar ter-century, only 850,000 CB licenses were issued. Then came the 1973 oil embargo, speed limits were dropped to 55 m.p.h. ("double nickel" in CB argot) and truck drivers installed the units to warn each other of lurking cops ("smokey bears") and radar cars ("Kojak with a Kodak"). Television news picked up the story, and the rest is hysteria.

Chaotic Delay. In January 1973, there were 26,682 CB license applications; in January 1975, 79,375; in January 1976, 544,742. At Gettysburg, Pa., where the FCC processes the applications, conditions have been hardly less chaotic than they were in July 1863. Unopened envelopes overflowed into the ladies' lounge; the FCC fell two months behind. Last month the agency moved to cut the delay by allowing anyone who buys a set to obtain an immediate temporary permit on mailing in $4 and an application form.

While CB "radiddio" is widely used by truckers and ordinary drivers to warn of speed traps ahead, the network is highly esteemed by highway patrols and police for its ever-increasing role in reporting accidents, crimes, stolen cars, fires, traffic tie-ups, even reckless drivers ("Harvey Wallbangers"). Several volunteer organizations of CBers have sprung up to monitor the air waves and provide round-the-clock emergency services. The biggest, called REACT (for Radio Emergency Associated Citizens Teams), claims more than 70,000 members in all 50 states, Puerto Rico, seven Canadian provinces and West Germany. Since its formation in 1962, REACT claims to have handled 35 million emergency calls, including 12 million highway accidents.

The social and economic background of CBers is changing rapidly. Once populated mostly by truckers and blue-collar hobbyists, CB land is attracting growing numbers of businessmen and middle-class families who use the sets for safety and information. CB is also a "bodacious" (in CB lingo, super, fantastic) way of relieving freeway tedium--so much so that truckers' use of amphetamines has declined drastically in recent years. Ordinary drivers tend to be as evangelistic about the medium as oldtime gear jammers. "When I'm on the road these days," says New York Businessman Lawrence LeKashman, "I'd sooner leave the spare tire behind than my CB." Enthusiasts predict that CBs will some day be required equipment on all cars.

The macho world of CB is part soap and part horse opera. Says Amitai Etzioni, the eminent Columbia University sociologist: "A CB allows you to present a false self: to be beautiful, masculine, tall, rich, without being any of those things. Like the traveling salesman who drops into a singles bar and says he's the president of his company, a person can project on the air waves anything he wants to be." The person who installs a CB set and adopts a "handle" (nickname) and starts "modulating" on the air, is creating a character and reaching out to others while still maintaining anonymity. Adds Etzioni: "People in our kind of society, torn from our roots, want to relate without fully investing ourselves in a relationship, as we would if we joined a church group or worked on a campaign. With a CB, you can have personal contact with the turn of a dial. It is very controllable and protects you from getting too involved."

CB is a godsend for many shut-ins and others who are isolated from the community. For some enthusiasts, like Mrs. Patricia Schey ("Kissy Face") who monitors her "home base" 16 hours a day in Madison, Wis., it is more of a passion. Almost everyone, however, responds to what Manhattan Psychoanalyst Joel Kovel calls "CB's element of voyeurism." That aspect of the CB phenomenon has not been lost on Mitchell Brothers, the porno-film producers. They recently released an opus with the self-explanatory title C.B. Mamas.

Potty Mouths. The real CB land has more sinister denizens. Police departments across the country report that mobile radios are being used increasingly in holdups and burglaries. CB sets themselves have become the favorite target of street thieves; 500 CB thefts were reported in Los Angeles during a three-month period. Game poachers use CB to outwit conservation officers. Though the California department of fish and game frequently changes its code, admits one officer, "poachers seem to know what we're doing before we do." Prostitutes ("pavement princesses") who plug their charms on CB have become so common that there is even a song about them, Rosie on the Ridge.

Potentially even more annoying is the widespread abuse of the channels --especially by so-called potty mouths using obscenities. The language on the Los Angeles air waves, says a sheriffs department engineer, Henry Richter, "is filthy. It's a disgrace; it's like a gutter." "Uncle Charley" or "Candy Man," as CBers call the FCC, also has a major problem with broadcasters who illegally use "hamburger helpers," or linear amplifiers, to boost the output of standard 4-watt transmitters beyond their normal range of five to ten miles. Their beefed-up blat can splatter normal television and radio reception. Yet another migraine for the feds is CBers' use of what they call "SBC," for "sick bird channel" --"ill eagle" (illegal) use of channels reserved for vital services.

CB's existing 23 channels are already badly overcrowded in metropolitan areas. Even Channel 9, which is supposed to be reserved for emergencies, is often invaded by mindless chitchatters ("ratchet-jaws"). Says James McKinney, FCC's deputy chief of field operations: "I have a feeling that by 1979, all I'm going to hear is one loud buzz." The FCC is working on a short-term solution: to expand the band to as many as 115 channels. But even that would be little more than, so to speak, a Band-Aid. Eventually, authorities agree, they will have to find a place on the radio spectrum for a second-generation band with 200 or more channels.

These problems are to be expected in so radical a coupling of social change and technological innovation. Questions about CB's influence have not even been formulated. With a "good buddy" system of 100 million or more Americans speaking compulsively in inelegant private tongues, what will happen to the language of Jefferson and Henry James? Will future presidential candidates have to campaign by mike from the expressways--and learn to call them "double slabs"? Or will the whole CB cult simply go the way of goldfish swallowing and Hula-Hoops?

Talk Shows. That fate seems unlikely. CB provides too many valuable uses and affordable comforts to fade out. From Nastyville to Tricky Dick's --Nashville to San Clemente in pre-CB parlance--the new radiddio offers a kind of openline talk show that entertains and instructs while conveying at best a genuine feeling of neighborliness never before associated with highway driving. "When you're riding around and listening to these people," says a Manhattan disc jockey, "what you hear is America at its best." Well, not always. But there is a bodacious new world out there, and its people are talking to one another again and even exchanging eighty-eights.

* Or perhaps was listening in on one of the other 22 frequencies that CBers can tune to simply by switching a TV-like channel selector.

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