Going Backwards To Progress
The checkbook didn’t allow for it, but I did it.
I spent umpteen hundred more dollars to buy a stereo receiver that had jacks for a phonograph so I could listen to albums and especially those good ole 45s!
I hauled my turntable into the store to be sure it would play right, and the installation required the extra hands of my father-in-law, but when we finished stringing all the cables together I was movin’ those 45s on and off faster than the diapers on our baby.
Each school year I give my sixth graders grief about how terrible their music is and how sad it is that none of the vocalists they like to listen to can, in fact, sing. They, in turn, make fun of my “old school” stuff. I tell them sometimes humanity has to go backwards in time to find progress because going forward only leads to decline.
A perfect example is their music industry of today in which “artists” sell records based on how ugly their hair is or how many times they can show off their belly button publicly. Occasionally I have to take an old album to the classroom to show the kids what vinyl music was because the students now all have portable CD players and consider anyone an antique if they are caught with a cassette. I don’t even bother talking about eight tracks...
One of the strangest experiences I ever had with Dad was when he showed my younger brother and myself how to “listen” to a vinyl record with a broom straw between your teeth. No, I am being serious! (Yet I don’t fault you for your unbelief because I also thought he was fabricating the whole thing just like his boyhood story about the kids who filled the school boiler up with water in the winter so it would freeze over the weekend and they would have to close down the school - but I digress.)
“When we were young,” he began with a push back from the table mixed with a lean in his chair, “we couldn’t afford a new phonograph needle so we’d have to take a straw from the broom, hold it between our teeth, put our hands over our ears, and put the tip of the straw in the groove. You can hear it inside your head that-a-way.”
Howls of laughter from the two of us trying to imagine such a scene made me forget to ask how they could afford a broom and especially any records. This laughter must have pushed him over the edge. He leaned forward - “Get your Mama’s broom!” Bill Nye the Science Guy never had anything like this. Sure enough, Dad pulled out a straw, put it between his dentures, put on a record and demonstrated the technique on his knees (our turntable was low down in a cabinet). We had to try it and what do ya know - it worked to some degree. Amazing how parents know what they’re talking about sometimes! He further explained that records “back then” produced better results than the ones “now-a-days.”
Which brings me to my next point: garage sales. I wanted to sell an old Admiral 80 stereo Dad had collected from somewhere (the kind that looks like a coffin with a flat top and the middle section flips up to reveal a stereo/turntable inside), so I was cleaning it out. I found an old stash of 45s buried in it. No, these didn’t go far enough back to have green or red vinyl as ones in my parents’ collection do, but the names were priceless. The previous owner of the Admiral put address labels on them so I knew they weren’t Dad’s and I started leafing through them.
Tommy Collins. Jean Shepherd. Bill Anderson. Hank Williams. Hank Thompson. The Fashions. Hank Snow. Liz Anderson. Jim Reeves. Lynn Anderson’s “If I Kiss You, Will You Go Away?”
Then things got a little weird.
Up came “Starlight Schottische” by Louise Massey and the Westerners. New one on me!
Eddy Arnold. Nothing weird there, but this 45 was not in a flimsy paper cover. It had its own cardboard cover which listed other albums “…available at your RCA Victor dealer” including “Dizzy Fingers,” “Jose Iturbi Plays,” “Barefoot Contessa,” and - I promise this is the truth - “Gid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers.”
Okay, maybe the names of the groups my sixth graders listen to are not so strange after all, and maybe not every look at the past brings progress.
I spent umpteen hundred more dollars to buy a stereo receiver that had jacks for a phonograph so I could listen to albums and especially those good ole 45s!
I hauled my turntable into the store to be sure it would play right, and the installation required the extra hands of my father-in-law, but when we finished stringing all the cables together I was movin’ those 45s on and off faster than the diapers on our baby.
Each school year I give my sixth graders grief about how terrible their music is and how sad it is that none of the vocalists they like to listen to can, in fact, sing. They, in turn, make fun of my “old school” stuff. I tell them sometimes humanity has to go backwards in time to find progress because going forward only leads to decline.
A perfect example is their music industry of today in which “artists” sell records based on how ugly their hair is or how many times they can show off their belly button publicly. Occasionally I have to take an old album to the classroom to show the kids what vinyl music was because the students now all have portable CD players and consider anyone an antique if they are caught with a cassette. I don’t even bother talking about eight tracks...
One of the strangest experiences I ever had with Dad was when he showed my younger brother and myself how to “listen” to a vinyl record with a broom straw between your teeth. No, I am being serious! (Yet I don’t fault you for your unbelief because I also thought he was fabricating the whole thing just like his boyhood story about the kids who filled the school boiler up with water in the winter so it would freeze over the weekend and they would have to close down the school - but I digress.)
“When we were young,” he began with a push back from the table mixed with a lean in his chair, “we couldn’t afford a new phonograph needle so we’d have to take a straw from the broom, hold it between our teeth, put our hands over our ears, and put the tip of the straw in the groove. You can hear it inside your head that-a-way.”
Howls of laughter from the two of us trying to imagine such a scene made me forget to ask how they could afford a broom and especially any records. This laughter must have pushed him over the edge. He leaned forward - “Get your Mama’s broom!” Bill Nye the Science Guy never had anything like this. Sure enough, Dad pulled out a straw, put it between his dentures, put on a record and demonstrated the technique on his knees (our turntable was low down in a cabinet). We had to try it and what do ya know - it worked to some degree. Amazing how parents know what they’re talking about sometimes! He further explained that records “back then” produced better results than the ones “now-a-days.”
Which brings me to my next point: garage sales. I wanted to sell an old Admiral 80 stereo Dad had collected from somewhere (the kind that looks like a coffin with a flat top and the middle section flips up to reveal a stereo/turntable inside), so I was cleaning it out. I found an old stash of 45s buried in it. No, these didn’t go far enough back to have green or red vinyl as ones in my parents’ collection do, but the names were priceless. The previous owner of the Admiral put address labels on them so I knew they weren’t Dad’s and I started leafing through them.
Tommy Collins. Jean Shepherd. Bill Anderson. Hank Williams. Hank Thompson. The Fashions. Hank Snow. Liz Anderson. Jim Reeves. Lynn Anderson’s “If I Kiss You, Will You Go Away?”
Then things got a little weird.
Up came “Starlight Schottische” by Louise Massey and the Westerners. New one on me!
Eddy Arnold. Nothing weird there, but this 45 was not in a flimsy paper cover. It had its own cardboard cover which listed other albums “…available at your RCA Victor dealer” including “Dizzy Fingers,” “Jose Iturbi Plays,” “Barefoot Contessa,” and - I promise this is the truth - “Gid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers.”
Okay, maybe the names of the groups my sixth graders listen to are not so strange after all, and maybe not every look at the past brings progress.