Rebel Convoys.

• Author: Walker, Jesse

Civil disobedience changes FCC policy--again.

Citizens Band radio was born in 1945, when the Allied victory freed some military frequencies for civilian use. Policemen and big boats were already using two-way radios in other parts of the ether; Motorola executive Daniel Noble suggested letting small businesses--delivery trucks, fishermen, valets--do the same. The Federal Communications Commission agreed, and reserved some shortwave space for a service along those lines.

Alas: This was an ultra-high-frequency zone, an area useless to all but the most expensive and sophisticated radios. The service remained moribund until 1958, when the FCC siphoned 23 channels from the amateur ("ham") band and rededicated them to CB.

The commissioners hoped the revamped Citizens Band would provide a place for "substantive and useful messages related either to the business activities or personal convenience of private citizens." The displaced hams argued that it would become a giant party line instead. The amateurs proved more prescient than the regulators: Within a year, the feds were battling "improper" uses of the Citizens Band, at one point even trying to keep people from speaking in "hobby-type expressions."

The harder the authorities fought, the unrulier the CBers became. The FCC imposed a license application fee, hoping that would squeeze out the riffraff. Instead, people simply neglected to get licensed. Tens of thousands joined the band each year, mostly blue-collar workers whom the government never expected to use the service. A freewheeling, down-home subculture evolved--one held in check, not by statutes, but by ever-evolving customs.

The regulators lacked the resources to enforce their edicts. Eventually, they threw up their hands and accepted that the Citizens Band had been overrun with actual citizens.

In the 1970s, of course, CB became a fad, a topic for trucker movies and country songs; even Betty Ford joined in, signing on as "First Momma." By 1975, the FCC was getting 200,000 license applications a month. In 1976, it took in 4.8 million. And that was just the people who bothered to apply: No more than half the country's CB users were licensed at all.

The commission was so overwhelmed that it simply gave up charging for licenses. Even that didn't deter the scofflaws. It still took the authorities a few months to process that permit, and they obviously weren't serious about enforcing the rules. So why bother applying?

A quarter of a century...