The other day, I somehow got to thinking about one of my favorite possessions when I was a kid: A reel-to-reel tape recorder. Somewhere around age eleven, my parents bought me a bulky Webcor model that would record and play 7" reels of audio tape. A few years later, it was stolen and my Uncle Nathan bought me a new one — a Sony model similar but not identical to the one in the photo above. You have no idea how much joy I got out of those machines. I made little homemade radio plays. I interviewed friends. I bought some reels of old radio shows via mail order and listened to them on the tape recorder. I taped shows off the air so I could enjoy them again later.
I used to tape long stretches of music off a local "top 40" radio station and then I'd select the songs I liked and use my little tape splicer to build them into a reel of favorite tunes. I must have listened to that reel of faves five hundred times as I worked in my little bedroom. It became so ingrained in me that to this day, whenever I hear the song "No Milk Today" by Herman's Hermits, I instinctively expect it to be followed by a playing of "Jimmy Mack" by Martha and the Vandellas. Because that's what came after it on that tape I played night and day.
But perhaps my greatest use of the tape recorder came when I invented the VCR…
I loved watching The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and also The Dick Cavett Show, which were both on late and opposite each other. It annoyed the heck out of me that on a school night, I couldn't stay up late enough to watch either…and when there wasn't school the next day, I could only watch one. I used to sit up near the TV in my bedroom (which had no remote control) and switch back and forth between the two shows, which still meant I missed a lot. Finally one day, I had a brainstorm.
I went to a nearby Radio Shack. They have since removed the space and they now call them RadioShacks but otherwise they were the same then as they are now: Lots of neat stuff sold by people who have no idea what any of it is or what to do with it. I knew what to do with some things they sold. I bought a radio that could pull in TV sound, a timer and couple of audio cables. At home, I combined them with my beloved reel-to-reel tape recorder. Thereafter before I went to bed, I would study TV Guide and decide which late night show to record — Carson or Cavett. Then I'd set my invention accordingly. The timer was deliberately adjusted so that when it read "11:30," it was actually 11:29 to allow for pad. At the prescribed moment, with a series of clicks that sometimes woke me up briefly, it would turn the radio and the tape recorder on, record the audio to the selected channel for 95 minutes, then turn both off. The next day when I came home from school, I could enjoy the sounds of Johnny's program or sometimes Dick's of the night before.
On nights when I could stay up late, I would watch one show and record the other. I usually watched Johnny and recorded Dick because I found that Mr. Carson's show was usually more visual. Listening (only) to Johnny, you missed those great reaction shots and facial takes, and this was also back when he'd do a lot of physical stunts and demonstrations.
It was a great system…and yes, I regret that I didn't save every one of those tapes. After I listened to one, I'd record another show over it.
I used my invention from around 1967 through about 1972. My life began to get busier and I began to lack the time to listen to what I was recording…so I'd skip some nights and eventually, I began to skip all of them. Then the Sony broke and I thought, "I have to get this fixed or replaced soon" but never did. In the late eighties, my friend Marc Wielage loaned me a reel-to-reel tape recorder — by then, not the easiest thing to get one's hands on — for a few weeks and I examined what remained of my old collection of tape reels. About half turned out to be unplayable, the result of my having bought the cheapest-possible tape as a kid and not storing it properly. I was able to dub off a few nuggets of audio treasure and put them onto cassettes. One of these days, I'll have to dig out those cassettes and see if what's on them can be converted to MP3s. I'm not sure anything there would matter to anyone but me. Mostly, what's on them would be a nice reminder of the days when I recorded those shows and of how important certain things were to me back then.