Every year at New Year’s, my wife and I watch Woody Allen’s wistful and loving tribute to the golden age of radio, “Radio Days.” The narrator of the film, Mr. Allen, reminisces about the fleeting sounds of his youth through a somewhat autobiographical story (with an actor that looks like a young Woody) that encompasses many stories about radio shows of the late 1930s and early 1940s, and his relationship to them as a boy.

I share the same love for the medium that Woody has, and looking back, I also have my own nostalgic memories of long-lost voices and sounds over the airwaves.

I started listening to public radio, specifically WFCR-FM, some 50 years ago during my last year at UMass on hearing the early morning program “Morning Pro Musica,” hosted by the much-loved Robert J. Lurtsema. Robert J (as he was frequently called) offered a balm from punk rock and disco with his thoughtful and eclectic presentation of classical music.

Every day the program would start at 7 a.m. with the sound of birds before the musical theme of the day, and then for an hour or so, mostly baroque music to ease you into your day. Robert J spoke slowly and softly, always telling you what you needed to know about the piece that he was going to play without ever being stuffy or pretentious. He frequently had his musician friends such as Joel Cohen, E. Power Biggs, and Scottish folk singer Jean Redpath as guests. So began my lifelong love of classical music under the tutelage of this wonderful man.

“Morning Pro Musica” originated from WGBH-FM in Boston, as well as did the “Reading Aloud” program. Every weekday at noon on WFCR-FM, host Bill Cavness would read for a half-hour from whatever book he was currently reading on the air. Short books would take a few weeks and long books would take months. I am indebted to Mr. Cavness for having introduced me to an extremely diverse range of authors and books such as Carl Sandburg’s “Remembrance Rock,” Mikhail Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita,” and Josephine Tey’s “The Daughter of Time,” just to name a few.

I frequently then read the books themselves, and I can honestly say that “Reading Aloud” had a greater influence on my future reading taste than all the literature courses that I took for my English degree. Thank you, Mr. Cavness!

Also originating from WGBH was a wonderful children’s show called “The Spider’s Web,” which also offered stories read aloud, as well as radio plays, and storytellers such as the great Jay O’Callahan, who told and sang his poignant home front drama “The Herring Shed.” I can’t think of a better way that children can expand their imagination than by listening instead of watching.

There were also full-length serialized radio plays on WFCR-FM such as Walter M. Miller Jr.’s novel “A Canticle for Lebowitz,” Douglas Adams’ “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” and George Lucas’s “Star Wars.” Up to then, I had never heard a full-cast radio drama, and these radio plays planted the seeds to my later in life love affair with radio plays.

I listened to “Prairie Home Companion” for nearly 40 years. Every Saturday evening it was two hours well spent with a venue full of marvelous humor, live music of all sorts, intriguing guests, and those wonderful “News from Lake Woebegon” stories told by the program’s host, Garrison Keillor. Since its passing, my Saturday evenings have lost something very precious.

Another long-running show on WFCR-FM that is sorely missed was “Car Talk”, a truly fun show for both motorheads and all of us who depend on automobiles to survive. Brothers Tom and Ray Magliozzi (aka Click & Clack, the Tappet Brothers) brought answering listeners’ automotive questions to a high art. Their humor was contagious. Their answers were mostly right, but even if they were dead wrong, as revealed on the “Stump the Chumps” portion of the show, they owned up with their self-depreciating humor and their brother vs. brother hijinks.

Sadly, there were many other programs that I remember that are now long gone from the local public radio airwaves. I remember and miss folk music programs like “Valley Folk” and “The Thistle & Shamrock.” I also recall being entertained by an over-exuberant classical music host named DeKoven who hosted a music show called “DeKoven Presents,” which presented me weekly with what he described as barococo music (music from the baroque and classical era). And there were many other programs that I still remember, but can no longer recall the names of.

As Woody Allen comments at the end of “Radio Days,” which ends in the early minutes of 1944, “The truth is, with the passing of each New Year’s Eve, those voices seem to grow dimmer — and dimmer …”

Raymond Fontaine is a retired community college teacher who lives in Westhampton.