When I was a boy my father built a Hi-Fi for our house. It was a very nice Hi-Fi, with a tuner, an amplifier, and turntable, all in one room, on shelves, with aluminum breadboards, and wires going here and there. The speaker, which was a big piece of furniture in another room actually had three speakers in it, one big, one medium sized, and one tiny. They were covered by a cloth, stretched over a frame on the front. My father built the box the speaker was in. He also strung wires up to his bedroom, where he intended to put another speaker, but evidently my mother found that undesirable for some reason.
No one in our neighborhood had a Hi-Fi then. (It was a fairly well to do neighborhood, mostly Government middle wigs.) Within a year or so, though, you could buy a Hi-Fi already made, in either one big cabinet, or several cabinets. I always felt my dad was somewhat surprised by that. I was crushed. All that factory finished stuff, shiny and built into a cabinet. But, the speakers didn’t get as big as dad’s for another three or four years. However, by then there were mumbles about “stereo” sets for the home. I didn’t believe a word of it.
I have Stereo AM/FM/MP3 player in my pocket. I feel very old.
My father still has his reel-to-reel tape player, turntable and forty-odd-year-old speakers I grew up with. He had the separate amplifier and tuner as well. He had about 7000 records at his peak, and umpteen reel-to-reel recordings (mostly classical off public radio). I remember him getting up in the middle of the night to press record and capture something he was missing.
My dad bought for me, and I built, an AM radio. It was breadboard wiring with bakelite headphones. I fell asleep listening to that puppy for years. Sometimes woke up with the phones still on my ears.
I have never been called old. At least, not by anyone within reach of my cane. But I remember well the day that I got the computer of my dreams – with 16k of memory, and the ability to display 8 different colors.
I still have my reel-to-reel tape deck (from 1969) my last turntable (1979) and the speakers I bought in 1978. They all still work, and I’m still using the speakers as my main set.
My old man was continually in the process of rebuilding the TV. It was a 22" Admiral b/w, in a square metal box. He kept a cigar box of tubes on the windowsill, and would replace whatever blew. I remember he’d put a chair in front of the set, with a mirror on it, and sit behind the TV with the back open, adjusting the focus, master hold and other parameters with a screwdriver. He also had a little box of tuning elements, whose coils he could rewind, for when a channel on the mechanical tuner went bad. Every now and then he’d take his box of tubes to the hardware store and check their measurements on the tube tester, which you could find in any hardware store.
Now, when your TV goes wonky, you throw it out and buy a new one. Yeah, I’m old, too.
Me too. My dad repaired televisions when I was growing up. He had to sell the business when color sets started coming in. (My dad is red-green colorblind.)
And last weekend, when I was doing a handspinning demo, a kid told me I looked just like her grandmother. <whimpers>
When I was a boy my father bought a 1938 Ford Deluxe Coupe. He was about sixteen when the car was built. It was in pieces when he bought it but all of the pieces were there. It sat in the garage, and I used to go out and look at it. I spent hours admiring the lines of the car, holding the grille and other pieces of chrome. I found the moth-eaten Vargas calendars that someone had left under the seat and wondered if this was the type of woman that my dad was attracted to when he was young. I tried to get him to go out and rebuild it, but he never found the time. Eventually he died and the Ford was given to a cousin to restore.
On Monday I got a call from my cousin’s wife. They are getting ready to retire and will need to get rid of the '38 Ford sometime within the next few years. I’d like to have it, but first I have to rebuild a '78 Triumph Spitfire that I have in my backyard. I’d like for my son to drive it when he gets his license. I was about sixteen when the Triumph was built…
I remember our all-in-one Hi-Fi stereo cabinet. It had an alarm clock. a radio (probably only AM) and a turntable that my Dad would play Herb Alpert and Bill Cosby records on. We kids loved Bill Cosby’s tales of Chicken Heart and one about making a go-kart. We also loved listening to the Grand Canyon Suite and another record with The Yellow Rose of Texas, Take Me Out to the Ball Game and Four-Leaf Clover on it.
I remember the Hi-Fi’s alarm clock because my parents didn’t have a clock in their bedroom so my Dad would use that one to get him up for work. Thing was, my parents were apparently very sound sleepers. The alarm would wake me up but not them. So, at a very young age, I got in the habit of getting up, going downstairs, turning off the alarm and coming back upstairs to wake up Dad. Should have woken him up and made him go turn it off but I was a kid–what did I know?
We had a series of black-and-white televisions back then. Even in those early days of broadcasting, they probably came to us already well-used. Dad would try to keep them in good repair but it always seemed to be a loosing battle. I remember us sitting in from of the set and having to call out, “Dad, the TV is flubby!” That was our way of saying that the horizontal hold had gone out yet again. We weren’t allowed to try to fix it ourselves.
I remember several times when Dad took tubes to one of those testing machines. The last one I remember stood in a local drug store until the mid- or late-seventies.
Oh, I also remember way back then a popular color for cars was tomato soup pink. Well, they’d be two-toned usually, with white being the other color.
We lived at a lake in the early '60’s. There was a fellow who lived across the way. He was a car salesman and sometimes we’d see him out on the lake with prospective client in an amphibious car something like this one.
I remember my younger brother playing his first cassette tape. As it got near the end we inched it forward slowly just in case the end wasn’t attached, as we had no idea how to thread it back on again if it wasn’t.
I was the first kid in my class to have a TV set in 1951. I had driven 16 miles to see the only other television around.
After the 17 inch Motorola was delivered, people came to our house just to watch it – even when the sound didn’t work. There was only one channel and it carried NBC. Howdy Doody was on when it was first turned on.
Shows didn’t come on until late in the morning. One day I was watching Howdy and Buffalo Bob and they had a special guest on the show. It was a man who said that he was going to start a news program that would come on early in the mornings. It was going to be called Today The man was Dave Garroway.
I watched the first show. I remember when they celebrated fifty years of flight and one hundred years of flight. That’s old.
Naw, you ain’t old. I remember them being in every 7-11 (convenience store) in town back when.
Old is when you asked your mother to read you the text on black-and-white cartoons because they didn’t have sound yet…and you were too young to read. That’s old.
