Sunday, March 28, 2021

Passover on 1960's Television, A Letter from Vietnam, "The Fat American", and a Moment from 1950

Today, we're going to run the gamut from religion to fatness, from Vietnam to car tires, all from a roughly ten year period, somewhere between 1962 and 1972, with a very brief side trip to 1950. 

Since we're in the first few hours of Passover, I thought this would be the perfect time to share a tape I came across some years ago, and listened to again over the winter. It features recordings of two televised programs about - and featuring elements of the celebration of - Passover. My guess is that they ran during the same year, although I don't know that for certain. 

I will largely let them speak for themselves. The first program on the tape, nearly exactly a half hour in length, features the Operatic and Broadway Tenor Jan Peerce, and comes from a series on NBC - one which ran without advertising - titled "The Eternal Light". This was a program which ran on radio, then television (while remaining on radio as well) for a total of 46 years.  

Download: "The Eternal Light" - Passover with Jan Peerce

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The second program - about which I have discerned fewer details - features another Operatic Tenor, Richard Tucker, who sings at times. Between his singing, there is a presentation of a Seder at home, presented in a sort of educational fashion. This one's nearly three quarters of an hour.

Download: Richard Tucker Presents a Passover Seder

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For those of you who didn't want to listen to 75 total minutes of religious programming - and for everyone who did - here is something I find truly fascinating. It's a tape I just listened to for the first time yesterday. This features a Marine narrating an audio letter from Vietnam. The speaker is quite self-effacing and I find him extremely likeable. He is speaking to a family - the Schaffer (sp?) family - but specifies that it's easier to visualize himself speaking to one person, and so chooses "young Ruthie" as the focus of his comments. 

The tape is punctuated a few times by such sounds as the unit phone ringing, the Marine's cohorts partying hearty somewhere nearby and a plane going over at low altitude, providing a level of verisimilitude rarely experienced in these sorts of recordings. 

Starting just before the end of side one, and extending through the entirety of side two, he draws out a secret that he wants Ruthie to keep - a gift he is buying, presumably for his wife or at least his girl. I'm guessing his wife, since the gift turns out to be something truly special, costing him "a year's pay". 

I think this is just a wonderful tape, and hope you do, too. 

Download: An Audio Letter from a Marine in Vietnam to Ruthie Schaffer and Her Family

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Coming back over to the domestic scene, here's a tape I found capturing an episode of "CBS Reports", from early 1962. It was fairly easy to nail down this episode and its date, but aside from its existence (verified on IMDB), there doesn't seem to be any other record of this program. 

It was absolutely wonderful to hear the long-missed voice of Harry Reasoner, who, in this case, was examining the expanding waistlines (and other measurements) of the American populace, in a program titled oh-so-discreetly, "The Fat American".

Download: Harry Reasoner - CBS Reports - "The Fat American" - January 18, 1962

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At the beginning of last month, after some prodding from a commenter, I initiated a new series, "Acetate of the Month" to capture the home recording format which was most common before reel tape became available to the masses. And that, of course, was the home record making device. Today, the second installment. 

And I will clarify that "the masses" did not have access to home disc-cutting machines any more than the average 1950's home had a reel tape machine. The disc machines were largely for the well to do, or at least the upper middle class. 

And so it was that one thing a person, group or family might do, is go to a public place and have the opportunity to make a record and hear their voices on it when they got home. This particular item is a six inch, 78 RPM record made at "The Chicago Fair", whatever that was, on July 9th, 1950, by The Rappaport Family. 

It looks like this: 

These records did not allow for a lot of recording - this record is barely a minute long. But it certainly captures the excitement of being able to record their own voices, even as they spend much of their 66 seconds complaining about how most things at the fair were not free this year. 

Download: The Rappaport Family - At the Chicago Fair, July 9, 1950

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(As a side note, this sort of side business still existed until at least 1968, because my family and I made one, in a downtown Chicago Woolworth's - I believe the resulting recording was a 45 RPM, but may have been a 78. I vividly remember this. We listened to it after it was made - my grandmother was in town for one of her rare visits - and in this case, her last one, before her death in 1972. At one point, she adopted a baby voice and said "I'm only three and a half years old". Sadly, we managed to damage the disc that day, before we even got it home.) 

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Finally, from my stack of "Very Short Reels", I grabbed one housed in a plain, solid black box with no markings on it whatsoever. It turned out to contain three ads for Firestone Tires. Unlike lots of tapes of this sort, these three ads are not variations on one particular sales pitch, but rather, they feature three completely different focuses. The ad mentioning the Indianapolis 500 would seem to place these ads in the early 1960's, but the reference to the number of years they'd been in use at that race, according to Wikipedia at least, would seem to date them closer to 1967 or 1968. 

Download: Three Firestone Tire Ads

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Wednesday, March 17, 2021

It's All About the Trappists

 Today, I have something that is perhaps even more esoteric than most of what I typically post here. I don't know how many people this will appeal to, but I've had this tape a long time, and I find it interesting, so I'm hoping some or most (or all?) of you will, too. I am posting the entire tape, in the various recorded pieces that appear on it. With the exception of today's "Very Short Reel" at the end, everything that follows here is from the same tape. 

Most of it is concerned with a young man, seemingly in his early days of high school, who has already decided that what he wants and intends to do with his life is join the order of the Trappists Monks. Much of the remaining tape concerns another young man with a similar calling. I'm mostly going to let this tape speak for itself, and simply introduce the segments. The names of the participants are in the file names, and can be heard on the tapes, but I'm only going to include their first names here. 

First up, and by far the longest segment, and the centerpiece of the tape and this posting, is the young man in question, offering up, first, an essay about the Trappists and their lives of solitude and silence, then an interview with the prospective monk, conducted by another young man. This segment covers the first side of the tape and part of the second, and is over 50 minutes long: 

Download: Andy - Essay on Trappist Monks and Interview About Becoming a Trappist

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Next, someone named Terrance reads a very brief letter that he has written to what was likely a local monastery: 

Download: Terrance - Letter from Terrance to the Brothers

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The same young man (Terrance) is then interviewed for a few minutes about answering a religious calling: 

Download: Interview with Terrance about Answering a Religious Calling

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The rest of the tape about - nine minutes or so - is something of a hodgepodge. Here is most of it, starting with the end of a very well known, disgusting and very non-Monk-like joke. The rest of this segment is made up of some deadly serious sounding readings - with accompanying sound effects at times, badly recorded at others. 

Download: End of a Joke and Some Readings

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And here, for lack of a better title, is what I've labeled "The End of the Tape". I'll just let you enjoy its charms: 

Download: The End of the Tape

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As an aside, I'm wondering what people think of this idea of sharing the entire contents of a single tape. If there is sustaining interest across most or all of it, is this particularly interesting, or not worth pursuing? I have several others where I think this concept might work well. 

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Finally, our "Very Short Reel". This is a bit peculiar, and I'm not sure what purpose this tape served. As it says on the box (below), this is recorded directly off of the soundtrack of a 16mm version of two commercials, in this case for Peter Jackson Cigarettes, a brand which still exists today, after nearly 120 years, but which I'd never heard of before. 

What strikes me about this tape - a little three inch reel, by the way - is that it has the typical low-fidelity sound that I would associate with a 16mm projector, and it's not clear to me why someone would want to copy the sound that way. Regardless, it happened, and it ended up in my collection, and they're a fairly interesting little set of two ads, so here is that tape!

Download: Soundtracks to Two Peter Jackson Cigarette Ads (From 16mm)

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