For those in the US, I'm assuming you are as tired as I am of the constant ads for this year's upcoming election. So of course I'm going to pile on a bit. By chance, earlier this month, I came across a wonderful tape from 1952, containing, among a few other things, a bit of live coverage of election night, 1952, in which Dwight Eisenhower trounced Adlai Stevenson.
This tape also happens to be a paper reel, a type of tape which holds a particular fascination for me, for reasons I've written about before. By 1952, this style of tape was being phased out, and only the earliest people/families who invested in tape recorders would even have owned or used paper reels. They tend to contain recordings from the dawn of tape recording, often family recordings or other things which fascinate me, and this tape is no exception. I will be sharing the reel's entire contents here.
The family who made this tape lived in Oklahoma, and were Democrats - the party that had been dominant in Oklahoma presidential votes up to that point. But the state went Republican in 1952, and has done so ever since, with only one exception (1964).
Here is their recording of a few minutes of coverage from that 1952 election. I can't tell if this is a radio or television report. The fairly short segment contains parts of the speeches from each candidate after the results were clear. I'm sure these are readily available elsewhere, but I'm guessing they are not as available in the context of the media coverage of the day, which is provided here, or the occasional commentary by the unhappy Democrats in the room (although not too unhappy, I'd guess - as you'll hear in the second segment, it is mentioned that many of the people present at a party wanted Eisenhower to be president, although I'm sure they'd have preferred he run as a Democrat).
Here is the segment:
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One of the things I tend to do is that I will share something that has a tie in to a moment in time, first, even if it ends up "burying the lead", so to speak, by shuffling the best stuff off to second place.
And that's what I've done here, from my perspective, because the flip side of the tape - it was the back side of the tape as I received it, but was clearly recorded first - is the highlight of today's post. Here we have a short compendium of life in Oklahoma, in June and July of 1952. You'll hear some people at a party (including that Eisenhower comment, so perhaps they weren't too upset in November), and just some general fun and descriptions of what life was like that day, month, year in Oklahoma. Then there are further recordings from the family who owned the machine, going forward into July, with most everything dated nicely.
I really love this tape, and I will let you discover its big and little joys. There are a few slow spots, but the overall effect is fairly magical. I will say that I am particularly enamored of the voice of and descriptions made by a boy who appears on the tape here and there, completely natural (already - remember, reel taping was brand new), and narrating his life and that of his family. He sounds to me to be about 12 years old, so he would be around 80 today. Are you out there?
Download: Life in Oklahoma, June-July, 1952
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The piece I've saved for last actually is heard first on the tape, but quite obviously came later, as it erased part of the election returns, as heard above (despite an command pasted right on the reel itself, "do not erase"). The election returns are heard for a moment, and then this political commentary, clearly recorded later, erases the next 14 minutes of those election recordings.
At this point, this is quite the piece of ephemera. Perhaps this was of vital interest to folks in east central Oklahoma that year, but at this remove, I can barely work up enough energy to understand what he's talking about, let alone care.
Here, as broadcast on KOTV in Tulsa, is Glen Twist, with his "Report from the Citizen's Committee"
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Here are the two sides of the reel, labeled as to their contents:
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Now here's a real oddity. From time to time, I have shared narration tapes I've found from slide shows of various types. But this one really threw me for a loop. It professes to be simply a narration for a slide show on early American art, and I got through much of it, the first time, thinking that's what it was. But there came a point that I said "this is a put-on", and listened again from the start. I'm not exactly sure what the joke is, because there were clearly things going on in the slides themselves which were meant to make people laugh, along with the little comments in the narration. But such is the joy and frustration of listening to a slide show narration without the slides. I'm curious to hear what anyone else thinks....
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Next up, here's a neat set of eight ads promoting the new Dodge line for 1971, presumably from the fall of 1970. This is from advertising giant BBD & O. We have three "rock" commercials, three "country" commercials and two commercials featuring the "sheriff".
I could have sworn I shared these before (and if I did, apologies for the repetition), but I can't find them, so here they are.
Download: BBD and O - Eight 1971 Dodge City Ads
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And finally, and by coincidence along the same lines, here's a tape I grabbed at random from a stack of "very short reels". In this case, it's a 1998, "end of season blowout sale" type ad for a car dealership owned by Ed Schmidt in Perrysburg, Ohio, produced by McGee & Starr and titled "Operation Elimination", which has a rather disgusting connotation to me, particularly given the play on Ed Schmidt's name at the end of the ad, but maybe it worked.
Download: McGee and Starr - Operation Elimination
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