My father sang with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir for sixteen years and encouraged interest in "serious" music, as did a neighbor mentor. I remember listening to the Texaco Met opera on a Westinghouse germanium transistor portable while digging dandelions out of the lawn in the 1950s. My mom liked Big Band swing, and both enjoyed broadway. Dad did one opera and one Broadway show in the chorus every year with the U of U theatre productions. Lots of cracked notes from evening practice sessions plastered on the living room ceiling of our old 'starter' suburban house.
None made it to the stage.
I liked hauling home old radios from the late 20s thru the 40s off curbside junkpiles and making them work. A local AM radio station, run primarily as a labor of love by a local Salt Lake City Lawyer, KWHO, featured serious music, sunrise to sunset every day, and the Tex Met opera every Saturday. That's usually what I played on them during the day.
We also had primarily three pop AM stations fighting for ratings, and one good jazz AM station, unfortunately parked on 910kc, the first multiple harmonic of the common AM 455kc IF frequency, which caused an accompanying constant annoying hetrodyne whistle on most 'modern' radios, but not the older early 1930s superhets and none of the TRF/ Neutrodyne 'Electric' radios of the latter 1920's that I loved.
I discovered "good" audio reproduction thru a series of events leading to the audio shops of Columbia, S. C. in the early 1970s during my Army career, and eventual introduction to the little pubs, The Absolute Sound and Stereophile, led me down the rabbit hole of technical audiophilia. Audio magazine, under Eugene Pitts III, was a constant in my life then, and the music reviews a valued guide. The mid-late 1970s Wiesbaden PX Audio Photo club complex was a legendary walk-in treasure chest of audiophile technological delights for vitrually anyone on any budget.
Good times, good memories.