My wife's reel-to-reel tape recorder is still with us. I believe that we sent my old tape unit to parts unknown several years ago. Click to enlarge.
photo by Harmon Jolley
Today, we live in a world of highly portable, highly functional electronic media devices of incredible capacity. The songs contained on boxes of 45 RPM records of yesteryear can now be downloaded from the Internet and carried everywhere on MP3 and iPod players. There are Internet jukeboxes that don’t require a service technician to swap out records and labels each week.
Something appears to be missing, though, from today’s audio media. I don’t see as many folks capturing the sounds of everyday life like we did on our reel-to-reel tape recorders. While going through some boxes recently, I came across some of my old reel-to-reel tapes.
Around Christmas, 1967, I opened a present containing my first and only reel-to-reel tape recorder. It was a General Electric, and made of black plastic, with a clear cover over the tape assembly. There were some new terms to learn, such as microphone, tape head assembly, supply and take-up reels, spindles, and the all-important capstan. When the user placed a brass sleeve over the capstan, the speed of the tape was changed. One had to choose between using a tape up quickly versus audio quality.
That Christmas, we spent part of the time visiting my aunt and uncle and cousins in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. My cousins were younger than I, and were even more amazed than I at being able to hear their words being played back on the tape recorder. I remember that we also recorded some of the theme songs of the Saturday morning cartoons.
The sounds of television and radio of the late 1960’s were on my old tapes. There were the theme songs of “The Beverly Hillbillies,” “I Dream of Jeannie,” “The Three Stooges,” and “College Bowl” (how did that get on there?). Just hold the microphone close to the television speaker, and voila! – sounds captured for posterity.
Tape recorders were also used in building a small music library of songs played on the radio. From the good old days when WDOD-AM was king of country music, I had captured tunes such as “Skip-a-Rope.” I remember that some radio personalities, including Luther, would alert listeners to have their recorders ready when a popular recording was about to be played. I’m sure that I’m not the only one with a recording of the Singing Dogs doing “Jingle Bells” and Stan Freberg starring in “Christmas Dragnet.”
Reel-to-reel tape recorders were very popular just capturing the sounds of what happened at home. In April, 1968, my father traveled with a group to the state firefighters’ convention in Memphis. My mother knew that he would be calling home, and asked me to record the conversation. It turned out to be a recording of the words of an eyewitness to history. The sanitation employees were on strike in Memphis, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was there to mediate a settlement.
My father reported that the Memphis mayor asked the firefighters to take some trash home with them. Hotel employees were wrapping boxes filled with garbage, and leaving them as unattended presents in the lobby for unsuspecting thieves to steal. A day or so after my father returned home from the convention, Dr. King was assassinated.
Most recordings were less newsworthy. I had recorded an interview with one of our Chihuahuas, who barked at the slightest provocation. My African underwater clawed frog, Tojo, made his singing debut through the glass of the aquarium. I captured my mother singing, “In the Garden,” and my father belting out the Mexican national anthem that he had learned while in the U.S. Navy.
Recordings of life at home could sometimes be embarrassing. My wife recalled that her neighbor experienced some embarrassment when she returned a defective tape recorder to the store. She didn’t preview what was already recorded on the tape, and the clerk was very entertained after the play button was pressed. Suffice it to say that a normal sound of digestion had been recorded, and was then played back at a very slow speed by the defective recorder.
The tape reels used on my reel-to-reel unit were three inches in diameter. There were units which used larger tapes, and allowed audiophiles either to record music from albums or to play pre-recorded music. Some devotees loved listening to music without the crackles and pops of vinyl.
The reel-to-reel tape format, though, had some of the same drawbacks as home movies. The tapes were fragile, and the units sometimes jammed. The box housing one of my tapes has “half broken” written on it. The reels also took time to load into the machine.
For recorded sound, there were better mousetraps waiting in the wings. The arrival of the competing formats of cassette and 8-track tapes gradually pushed the surviving reel-to-reel tapes and recorders into the closets, attics, and basements of the world. Just think of all of the fond memories recorded onto those small reels of tape.
If you have memories of reel-to-reel tape recorders, please send me an e-mail at jolleyh@bellsouth.net.
One had to have splicing equipment handy with reel-to-reel tapes. Click to enlarge.
photo by Harmon Jolley