and the music played on

I come by my fascination with stereos honestly. I know I spent hours listening to 45’s on a record player that only played 45’s. I know we later had record players that played 78’s, 45’s and 331/3 records. The first one I really remember was the one that the speakers folded out on. If you closed the top and folded in the speakers you had a box. It would hold several LPs (331/3 vinyl) at one time and was quite a machine. Mom was quite a believer in Reader’s Digest collections of LPs. I was particularly fond of The Waltz Kings. There were several. While we were at Pt. Mugu dad got the tape recorder. This thing was wonderous. It recorded music from the record player or another tape player. You could put what seemed like endless albums on one tape and play it forever. The tapes were quarter inch wide on seven inch reels. Remember, this stuff was cutting edge at the time so of course it didn’t come cheap. Have I told you dad was resourceful? Pt. Mugu was home of the Pacific Missile Range. They shot missiles from little islands off the coast of California and tracked them on their flight down the range by computer. Our government in all its wisdom and desire to keep information pure tracked all of this stuff on one inch wide twelve inch round reels. Once they had been recorded on the government would not use them again. The information could be erased when it was no longer needed but they refused to use them again. That made for a lot of scrap high quality audio tape just going to waste. Did I mention that dad was resourceful? He and another of the guys from his squadron felt the need to rescue some of this scrap because they just couldn’t handle it just going to waste. Problem. The tape was 1inch wide and on huge reels. Solution. A machined block with 3 shaving razors that you could run the 1inch tape over and rewind to seven inch reels (run by a sewing machine motor) and wa la! Tapes for the cost of the reels. We had hundreds. The other guy had hundreds. We had clear reels. We had red reels. We had blue reels. I would not bet against finding some of those tapes on dad’s book case or down in the basement today.
Unclewesty, over and out.