Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Sock It To Me
Mom has been gone 13 months, and it begins to dawn on me that a proverbial gut punch is just going to be part of the holiday season from now on.
Something I learned about Mom this past year: she kept everything. As the house I grew up in emptied, the house I own filled with toys I thought long gone to garage sales and thrift stores, posters from school plays, and… dozens of open reel, quarter inch tapes plus the machine that used to play them.
Thanks to the Internet, I was able to identify and acquire what was needed to get the tape deck working again: belts, deoxit, a ceiling fan capacitor, and very basic soldering skills.
So I started listening.
Most were music mix tapes. A few tapes are priceless, but only to me & my cousins. It is amazing to once again hear voices silenced long ago (my great-grandmother! Born in 1893 and Mom’s favorite person in the world).
And then there was this one: “Santa Claus Complaint, KMPC December 24, 1969″ and “Dickens Of A Christmas Carol, KMPC December 25, 1970.”
Google didn’t turn up much: a local newspaper’s tongue-in-cheek radio listing. It seems these were just to be broadcast once to the city of Los Angeles and then forgotten.
So in tribute to the Mom who kept everything, I’m happy to release into the wild some 50-year-old holiday ephemera from the witty mind and deep, satisfying voice of Gary Owens.
Merry Christmas.
Published in Entertainment
Hope you’re finding ways to save and spread the rest among your cousins.
Oh yes. Captured and distributed, similar reports of jaws dropping shared among us.
What a fun project and what treasures! My condolences on the loss of your mother. Yes, they get better, but they don’t get easier, these holidays with bittersweet memories.
My father’s mother died 25 years ago, in late October. She liked to do her Christmas shopping early (Sweaters for most adults – if they actually fit it was a bonus, and coincidentally I’m actually wearing the last one she got me). She had already gotten her gift for my father, and had the store wrap it. Then she had hidden it where she hid the other presents till she got the tree up. We found it after she died. Every year my father puts it under his tree. Like some of your tapes it likely means nothing to anybody else, but it means the world to him.
It’s the reason God gave us the innocence of children.
Both of my parents were born in October, exactly 51 weeks apart. They were married in November. Dad died 10 days after their anniversary. Then comes the holidays. The fourth quarter of every year was horrible – until it wasn’t.
My lovey bride was born on my parent’s anniversary day. A sad day became a happy one. And then God gave us a girl. And then a boy. And another. And another. I still get wistful but I have a giant life raft to hold on to.
I would like to second that emotion. One of my best friends is a successful author in the field of narrative nonfiction and he constantly tells anyone who will listen to him to archive their family writings, recordings or videos and donate them to the local historical society. Seemingly innocuous material can be turned into a great novel.
One poignant little post! A fine family story, AndTheRest, and a nice piece of writing. Thanks for restoring the tapes, at least to the degree of making some of them playable, and sharing them. This is Los Angeles radio before my day (I moved here in 1977).
I once wrote on R> about home movies. Individually, they’re just nostalgic and or fun. When you look at a bunch, you notice details about the past that fall below the radar of most historians or cultural histories in general.
Family audio tapes are still out there, but it won’t be many more years before the red iron oxide comes off the backing. Play ’em or transfer ’em now, and sort them out later, is my advice to anyone who comes upon a trove.
Also, if you find a stash of old photographic negatives, do *NOT* throw them away. They scan so much better than prints do. Unfortunately my mom threw out a whole shoebox full just a couple months before I started a major scanning project some years back.
We do have a digitized audio recording of my sister (now 65 years old) “reading” Peter Rabbit to my dad when she was about two or three years old.
Thanks. Writing as therapy.
I was surprised at how well the tapes played after all this time. Nevertheless, after getting the machine together, I immediately captured audio on all 5 clearly marked family tapes in one long session. Couldn’t stand not knowing if they would still play, or if the tape deck would quit if I turned it off again (still going strong 9 months later!)
I remember hearing Johnny Magnus on KMPC as a child, but was never happy to hear him because it meant the Angels were in a rain delay. I didn’t know he worked with the Laugh-In announcer and the California Lottery Big Spin host until queueing up that tape!
My dad may still have his, but they’re all out in an unheated garage, where they’ve been for many years. They may not be salvageable, but according to what he remembers, it’s mostly all radio recordings, nothing family.
Some tapes, by the way, turn to goo too. The US Census bureau lost a lot of its late 60s / early 70s records because the tape turned to gel.