There’s still plenty more here that requires my attention, both paperwork and household repairs. But I’ve gotten through enough of it that I can return to doing some light blogging. I’m hoping to be able to also indulge some light jogging this year.
My German-made Thorens turntable is now 39 years old, and so far it has required only minor maintenance that I have taken care of myself. This video is about restoring a German-made 1959 Volkswagen. Whatever happened to white sidewall tires?
When my parents ran a florist shop in Wisconsin for a few years, my father bought a ’59 Volkswagen bus for the business. There’s a brief glimpse of one that looks exactly like it at 6:00 into the video. There was no gas gauge, and when the gas started to run out you had to turn a valve on the floor to open a small auxiliary tank, then look for a gas station.
Shortly after buying this record, I invited a girl to listen to it with me in my dorm room, and I was delighted when she agreed. We were in Campus Crusade for Christ together, and I had fallen totally in love with her the moment we met. The influence of this complex and strong-willed girl was profound and lasting, despite her never allowing the relationship to become romantic. She could wiggle her pinky finger in my direction and I’d come running.
Then, incredibly, as we were about to graduate, she proposed marriage! (The first of two women who did that, actually.) By then her faith was stronger than ever, but I was in the process of giving up my own faith, so it was not to be. Life is crazy, huh? Through most of our time at college we attended church together, including one summer, and something about that eventually led to Bill Clinton. Yep, life is crazy. I’ll explain later.
Adams Lane, Norwalk, Connecticut, 1967 — My brother Jeff had an inexpensive AM radio transmitter kit. He put it together and I helped him string up a very long wire for an antenna, out of his room to a tree in our backyard. Friends up the street were on the phone, ready to tell us if the setup worked.
Speaking into the cheap mic that came with the kit, then holding it up to the speaker of our Arvin record player, I had my first taste of being a radio DJ, playing a record belonging to our sister Liz. The kids up the street said they could hear us! That record has always been my favorite Rolling Stones single.
This is a blog post about cassettes, with no mention of the Sony Walkman, except here. The Compact Cassette was developed by a Belgian team of engineers at Philips, and introduced under the Norelco brand in 1963. Two years later, to promote the new format, Philips gave portable cassette decks to EMI for the Beatles to try.
Upstairs at EMI Studio 2, 1965. Engineer Norman “Hurricane” Smith is on the left.
Christmas, 1969, I received a Panasonic RQ-204S cassette deck. It was rugged, with very good sound that could be played loud without breaking up, even at full volume.
I used the Panasonic deck to record WBCN radio and some records, but especially to exchange voice letters with my friend Greg, back in Connecticut. Long distance phone calls were out of the question, but a cassette could be mailed with a couple of stamps.
Norwalk, Connecticut, January, 1969
I first learned about cassettes as a computer software medium upon meeting one of my college roommates, named Brad. Before starting at Westfield State, Brad spent a year aboard the Atlantis II research ship, out of Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
The Atlantis II is best known for hosting the Alvin deep-ocean submarine, and for being used to locate the Titanic. The year when my friend Brad was aboard, scientists were conducting the early research into Continental Drift. I recall the project ended up being featured in National Geographic.
Brad was a math whiz just out of high school, working as a Fortran programmer on the Atlantis II. Cassettes were used to load programs and for data storage. When we met, Brad had a large collection of cassettes from the ship that he had mostly repurposed from data to music, with his very expensive, high-end portable Sony deck. Ten years later, working with Brad at a software company, the sound of the 300 baud modems we used was indistinguishable from what I heard playing data cassettes.
Which brings me to what this blog post is really about — Radiolab’s Mixtape series, and their Cassetternet segment from a month ago. The first part is about cassettes used for software. The second part returns to cassettes as a means of human communication; specifically, their influence in bringing about the Islamic Revolution in Iran.
I got “Who’s Next” for Christmas fifty — 50! — years ago.
More recently, Joe Pera had the same reaction to the album’s first song that I did, half a century ago.
And yes, there was a Sally who took my hand as we listened to the record together. Sally had brilliant red hair when I knew her, like Jenna Thiam a couple of posts ago.
