The radio was my best friend growing up.

That’s only a mild exaggeration. As a kid growing up on a farm, I didn’t have neighbor kids my age close by. So I spent a lot of time exploring the fringes of my family’s 20-acre farm, the nooks and crannies of our hundred-year-old barn, the nuances of 1960s comic books and the inside of my head.

And the wonderful words and music that came pouring out of my radio.

The other day I was explaining to someone how world-changing a shift the change from AM to FM radio was. I had grown up listening to a local AM radio station, WERK, that featured such personalities as Bill Shirk, David Letterman, Bruce Munson, Tom Cochrun and Gary Demaree. The WERK station and transmitter were not far from where I grew up — along the banks of Buck Creek in southern Delaware County — so it felt like my radio station in a way.

WERK was on the radio on the school bus, if we were lucky and the driver was in a good mood. I still remember one morning when a group of us on the bus were terrified and tantalized when a WERK announcer reported, in mock seriousness, that a Loch Ness-style sea serpent had been spotted in Buck Creek.

Not that I didn’t love the allure, the romance, of far-away stations.

As I drifted off to sleep each night, Chicago’s WLS was my lullaby. I loved imagining the studio of the big-city station, where giants like Larry Lujack worked. I thrilled to imagine the booth where records were spun and the spot where the jocks broadcast and announcers recorded commercials.

Magic.

I’m not alone in being fascinated with the allure — mysterious and personal at the same time — of radio. Remember that scene in the 1973 George Lucas movie “American Graffiti” when a character seeks out real-life DJ Wolfman Jack, finding him holed up in a little building in the California desert, sending his voice out into the night?

There’s not as much magic in radio these days. Maybe it’s because I know how radio, like other businesses, works now. It’s a little like learning how movies are made, or how small TV studios are.

And nothing could hope to equal the memory of lying in bed, small radio on the bedside table, listening to the hypnotic words of a DJ. The guy spinning records was hundreds of miles away — or maybe just a little further south along the banks of Buck Creek — and thousands of people were hearing his voice.

But he was talking to me.