It is so fun to hear what everybody is working on for Christmas gifts! Also, everybody sounds quite sane about the Christmas knitting this year, so I'm glad to hear there isn't too much of a frenzy going on right now. That reminds me, I still have to finish the sweater for dh.....which I'll do tonight, when he is at his choir rehearsal.
The last time we visited my mom and dad, as we were leaving, and before I could think about it and say, "Just wait one minute!", my dad put this into the back of our van:
It is a reel-to-reel tape recorder/player which my dad purchased in the 1950's, and in addition to being the size of a suitcase, it weighs approximately 33 pounds -- definitely not something you'd stick in the pocket of your coat like, say, an iPod... He included a stack of tape reels, and told me that if I could figure out what was on the tapes, which ones were worth keeping, and which ones weren't, then it would make a **lot** of people happy. (I think what he really meant by that is, "Mom wants all of this cr*p out of the house.")Seems like an easy enough task, except for the fact that the 33 pound recorder/player **doesn't** !! Turning it on yielded a big humming noise and a lit light bulb, but the mechanism which is supposed to advance the tape didn't. Now I am an electrical engineer, but 1950's tape recorder technology is something they didn't teach me in the 1980's, nor do I have the time or desire to really dig into it right now...
And so, I went to see Bob. After making several phone calls and web inquiries, it seemed like Bob would be able to help us out -- mainly because my schedule was so crazy with the class and the preschool and swimming lessons and being home when my son's bus returned him to us at the end of the day, and Bob was able to see us on a particular Thursday morning when we happened to have a free two hours. He had equipment which allowed us to determine what was on both sides of the tapes at the same time and which could filter out some of the tape quality issues, etc. And so, after going through five tapes, we turned this stack:
into this:
It includes recordings of one of my dad's bands (from more than 40 years ago), some of his very fine accordion playing, and a little musical show my siblings and I put together in 1976. I'll make a label and content sheet for it... and then this will be my Christmas gift to my dad, along with the broken 33 pound reel-to-reel tape recorder/player...unless one of our readers would like it, but I'm telling you, shipping would not be cheap...More about gifts in my next post. I finished up shopping for all of my nieces and nephews and will share what I found which was either made in the USA and/or fair trade...but now I must go grocery shopping. Also, I'm planning on there being actual knitting content in my next post...
Have a great day!
Warm regards,
Laura (YarnThrower)
That's really great -- I'll bet both of your parents really appreciate and get a huge kick out of that CD. I need to do that with the two 78 rpm records that my mom recorded in the 40's. My sisters and all my nieces and nephews should have a CD of that, don't you think?
ReplyDeleteOh, that's so cool! My aunt took a record my grandmother had made of her singing on a radio show in the 50s and sent to my grandfather (who was fighting in Korea) and put in on CD for all of us. My grandmother recently had old reels of film put on DVD, so my brother and I got to see my dad's vacation in Disneyland in 1958 :) Archiving these old media is amazing for the younger generations, isn't it?
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