Back in My Day: A Thirty-Something Remembers Dearly Departed Technology

I look at my daughter's room and her toys and I think to myself, "How in the world did we ever cope or live to see our fifth birthday?" Here are some random thoughts on things I grew up with that my child will probably never understand.

Handheld AM Transistor Radios

One of the websites I'm fond of here in Louisville is 79waky.com. It is devoted to an AM radio station that defined rock music for Louisville in the 60's and 70's. I can remember listening to WAKY 790 on my little AM FlavoRadio from Radio Shack. These radios were inexpensive, and had speakers of less fidelity than you'd find in a dollar pair of headphones. They were usually powered by a 9 volt battery, and after about a week of use, they built up static in their volume control that would result in some nice white noise everytime you tried to turn it up or down.

They also had nice little schematic diagrams in them that showed how it was all wired. Apparently in the 1970's, we were all MacGyver. My parents also had a Panapet, a cute little radio that had a radio dial and a volume and tuning control that looked like eyes. It was attached to a long chain with a keyring attached. This always fascinated me because the thing weighed about 2 pounds, which meant that if you used the chain to carry it around, you could also defend yourself by swinging it over your head and chucking it at someone. At last check, my parents still had one, and it worked. I like to think that the iPod's white earbuds are a nod to the old earphones we used to shove into our earcanals with these radios.

8-Track Tapes

My family still has three 8 track tape players and a large selection of the tapes. 8 Track tapes represented the latest in technology in the mid 60s, providing the user with a nice way to take their music on the go. Unfortunately, the limited amount of tape that the 8-Track could hold, and the fact that it contained 4 separate sets of stereo tracks meant that record companies had to be creative when separating an album. Sometimes songs would get tracked in the middle, so you'd hear the song, then a loud "KACHUNK" as the player moved the heads down a track, then your song would start again. According to 8trackheaven.com, the last 8 tracks were produced for record clubs up until 1988, with the last 8 track apparently being Fleetwood Mac's Greatest Hits (A selection I bought on CD that year).

Black and White Television

As analog television rapidly fades into the sunset, let me give a shout out to Black and White TV. Our house has seven televisions right now. All color, two digital, five analog. It may be hard for my daughter to believe, but there were still people back in the 70s who didn't even have COLOR televisions. And most kids were lucky to have a television. If they did have one (like me), it was typically a black and white model, with rabbit ears, a large wire "Bow-Tie" antenna that would pop off when the wind blew too hard, a horizontal hold that would get wonky and cause your picture to roll, and a volume control with the exact same problem as their FlavoRadio, namely static whenever you moved it. 19 inch televisions were BIG SCREENS, and having a remote control would add a hundred or more to the price.

My 12 inch Zenith probably cost about $150.00 at the time, but did a pretty good job of sucking in the Louisville TV stations with a minimal of effort on the bowtie antenna. It received hundreds of hours of play watching reruns of Gilligan, Leave It To Beaver, the Brady Bunch, and others.

Records and Record Stores

These 12 inch vinyl platters have never really left us. Following their alleged "demise" in the early 90's, they were repositioned as a niche product, appealing to a snobby subset of collectors and bands too hip for their own good. Many audiophiles claim that lp's sound better than CDs. Of course, these are the people who spend more on a diamond needle than I did on my wife's diamond ring, and who probably take better care of their records than just running a Ronco Record Vacuum over them occasionally. Still, there was something satisfying about owning an album on record than on cassette or CD. The covers were big enough to be appreciated as art. The discs themselves could be different shapes, colors, and designs. And they were a lot easier to flip through at a record store.

Ah, the record store. While I have an iPod, and appreciate iTunes, there is something that just isn't that satisfying about clicking links to see albums. You miss the community of people that gravitates toward record stores, people who loved music. You miss the chance to hear that random song that will make you a fan of an artist you never heard before. You miss the posters, the sights, the weird guy with the pierced scalp, and above all the chance to buy music in a permanent form, not an impersonal electronic file.

Boom Boxes

A few weeks ago, my daughter did a little dance on the floor and said to us, "I'm break dancing." Unfortunately, because we laughed a bit too hard at her wholly unexpected statement, we have yet to find out where she heard about break dancing. It brought to mind the visual of the boom box, the allegedly portable radio/cassette players powered by $30 worth of batteries, and with enough lights to land a plane in the fog. Granted, these were only a small subset of the boom box industry, but most of us in the late 70s and early 80s had some variation of one of them. I remember measuring quality by the smoothness of the eject. If it shot out like Dick Cheney spotting a lawyer on a hunting trip, it was junk. If the tape mechanism slowly slid out like it had nowhere to go in the next year, it was a quality piece of merchandise. And these things weren't cheap. Often the barest bones brand name model was over $100, and one that would make an 80's street dancer proud might cost over $500.

I can't imagine explaining to my daughter, who no doubt will have some sort of implanted earbud by the time she's a teenager, that people used to carry these things on their shoulder's with them like some sort of crowd clearing luggage. Perhaps it is just best to point her to the Pocket Calculator Show's boombox section for a primer.