A Tragic Industry, Some Funny Recipes, Children at Home, The Summer of '64 and More

First off, I'd like to than Eric Patton - yet again - for identifying details that I didn't have the resources (or, in this case, didn't take the time) to dig up. The baseball recording from my last post is from a game played on July 3, 1962. 

To Eric and anyone else who is interested: This particular collection of reels contains two more tapes of baseball broadcasts from roughly the same era (very late 1950's or very early 1960's). However, the recording quality is as bad as I've ever heard on a tape, and worse than anything I've ever heard here short of shortwave - they sound like they are coming over shortwave, and broadcasts simply start and stop at random. At one point, I realized I was listening to a broadcast of a collage baseball game. If there is interest, I will post these. But... they are lengthy (one is two hours, twelve minutes and the other is 55 minutes) and REALLY hard to listen to. Let me know!

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I'd like to start with something pretty awful, but awfully fascinating, too. It's an interview, very likely from the 1950's, with someone named Captain Hill (along with "Jimmy") on a show which I think might be called "The Pepperell Forum" - but that's just a guess, as the name of the show is said very quickly. The host is Major Barren (and again, I'm guessing at the spelling of his name). 

The subject of this abomination is "The Sealing Industry", aka the killing of seals, including baby seals, for their pelts and other materials. While I understand that this is basic necessity for people such as the Inuit, that's not what's under discussion here, and in any event, the killing of seal pups - discussed here - has long since been outlawed. 

I guess I'm both horrified and mesmerized - in the way one might be at looking at a terrible car crash - at the tone of this interview, which is very much clinical and informational. At one, point the interviewer does make mention of something terrible or awful happening, and I thought maybe he was going to acknowledge that they were talking about something incredibly cruel. But no, he was talking about an outing for hunting that ended in the deaths of multiple hunters. Oh, that. 

And to the contrary of any thoughts of awfulness contained in the practice itself, at the end of the show, we are told that the we've been hearing about "The Fabulous Sealing Industry". 

Download: The Pepperell Forum - The Fabulous Sealing Industry

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How about a palate cleanser. I was requested some time ago to share more tapes from my own childhood, and I was absolutely delighted to find the following short tape not too long ago, on a tape I had not listened to since I was a teenager (at which point I had catalogued what was on said tape), and which I have no recollection of EVER hearing before. 

I believe I've about eight years old here (putting this in 1968 or 1969), recording on what may have been the first tape given to me to be my very own - a three inch reel, recorded at the ultra slow speed of 1 7/8 IPS, in quarter track mono (different recordings on all four tracks) so as to get the most recording time out of it. Most of it was nearly unlistenable goofing off, save for some very nice interactions with my older brother. But in one segment, heard below, I read a series of recipes. I would love to say that I was this creative or deliberately funny to have written all of these fake recipes tongue-in-cheek at age eight, but that's absolutely not the case.

No, I'm reading from some source. I don't know where I got these from, but I'm guessing it was a book. And listening to the tape, I'm fairly certain this was a book - or perhaps an article - featuring a series of recipes dictated by kids my own age or younger. They are silly, funny, ridiculous and delightful. I love this tape. 

Download: Bobby Reads Kid Recipes

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Now it's time for some other children, perhaps a decade before the above - at least, I'm guessing it's the late 1950's), being silly, being fun... being kids. It's apparently both the week between Christmas and New Years (or thereabouts) AND around the time for one of the children's birthdays, judging from the various conversations heard here. 

This tape was in the same stack of tapes as was the one from which came the "very short reel" in my last post - the segment with the section about the cow going moo - and it could well be that both tapes came from the same family. 

Download: Kathy, Jackie, Michael and Others - Home Recordings, Christmas and Birthday Talk and More

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Here's something common to this blog but just a little bit different. It's a tape made from New York Top 40 powerhouse WINS in the summer of 1964. Normally, I'd be drooling over this, as would a certain percentage of my readers/listeners. However, this is one of those frustrating tapes where the taper made every effort - very effectively - to cut out all DJ voice overs, patter and commercials, and just get the songs. 

The reason I'm sharing it anyway (since it only contains the songs, many of which are extremely commonly available) is that I was sort of taken aback by the sheer variety of music heard on such a leading Top 40 station that summer. I am a huge record collector and have been studying the charts, and pop music in general, for more than 45 years. Yet there were close to a dozen songs within this two hours of recording that I'd never heard before. 

And were it not for the lists of songs included in the box, I'd have had to do a lyric search to find out what they were, and I'm quite certain some of them would not have been found online by that search. I was also sort of dumbfounded that The Beatles didn't show up until about 90 minutes into the recording, and even then, they appeared first in a version of one of their songs by The Boston Pops. Really? On WINS? The actual Beatles don't show up - during a tape made while they were dominating radio and the world - until eight songs from the end of the tape. 

I know that at that time there was a plethora of local and regional hits heard on many regional stations, but I guess I didn't expect that to be the case so much for what was perhaps the most powerful Top 40 station of its day. The tape box says something about "Tip Top Talent Hunt" - perhaps that's the explanation - that portions of this tape were recorded during was some sort of "potential future hits" programming. But on the other hand, the more obscure records heard here are played throughout the length of the tape...

Here's that portion of the box: 

One final note: I was sort of stunned by the out and out theft of others' material heard early on in this tape. The third song on the tape is identified as "Rules of Love", and even the compiler here didn't know who the artist is (an online search finds a single hit for the lyrics, and attributes them to The Orlons, which makes sense given the weird bass singer heard on this track). This record is literally "What'd I Say" rewritten with new lyrics. Note for note, section for section and nearly chord for chord. Astonishing. Three songs later comes "Moon Maid", a deeply unlikely tribute to a side character from the Dick Tracy comic strip which owes its existence to "Alley Oop". A little less ridiculous in terms of plagiarism, but only by degrees. (Youtube proves this one to be by "Billy Dee & The Debonaires", by the way.)

Download: WINS, New York, Summer, 1964

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And here are the lists - I believe you can open/save these and make them bigger. I made them small to save space: 

      

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And now, a little Ed and Frank. I have, in my collection, a small group of tapes featuring said duo, performing live at who-knows-where, each of them with little stickers on the reel with their names, the date, the speed of the tape and, on this tape, at least, the words "electric piano". And that's all I know. 

Actually, I find this stuff pretty damn unlistenable - it is electric piano... and brushed drums, with the very occasional vocal thrown in. Now, when I write what I'm about to write, I'm not talking about billed duos who actually have a full band behind them, or folk singing duos who don't need anything more than a acoustic instruments and voices: 

But with those exceptions, two person "groups" are, in my experience, pretty ridiculous, painfully limited and generally awful - looking at you, The White Stripes - and Ed and Frank are no exception. 

Download: Ed And Frank, 7-4-57

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For my "Acetate of the Month", I've selected a record featuring a presentation of William E. Fitzpatrick, being honored as the "Rochester Citizen of the Day" on some unnamed radio station and by an unnamed announcer. The date is August 1st, 1951, and the record looks like this. 

And it sounds like this: 

Download: Audiodisc Acetate - Rochester Citizen of the Day - William E Fitzpatrick - 8-1-51

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The flip side simply says "NG" for No Good (see below), but contains the same material, told in three seconds longer than on the usable side. For whatever reason, this version was not considered suitable for airplay. 

Download: Audiodisc Acetate - Rochester Citizen of the Day - William E Fitzpatrick - 8-1-51 (NG Side)

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And now for the "Very Short Reels" entry for this week's post. And technically, this is part of a slightly longer reel (15 minutes or so), as this section comes after a short period of some dull recordings of commonly available music off of full albums played on the radio. A young woman gives the date and is excited about the upcoming Perry Como Kraft Music Hall show with Eddy Arnold - this allowed me to identify the year as 1967. Here is that show. Then there's time for a bit of talk about the music she'd just shared and just a little bit of family news and personal goings-on, and talks just a bit about some situation familiar to both her and the recipient of her outreach. 

Download: A Short Audio Letter - 1-25-67

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Guest Post: Some Great 1950's Rarities - Jazz Radio, Lee Hazen, A & P, Rod Serling's Music Show & The Midwestern Hayride

Today, I have something special for everyone. Since the summer of 2019, I have been in an email exchange with a man named Matt, who has a vast reel to reel collection of his own. He has been nice enough on two occasions to send me 1800 foot reels full of some of the treasures from his collection. I don't think I understood after he sent the first one that he meant for me to share whatever I wanted to, on this site (and I need to go back and revisit that tape, now that I do understand that), but he made this clear to me a few weeks ago regarding the most recent tape he sent. And so that's what I'm going to do. I'm also going to turn over the comments, for the most part, to him, and I will share those excerpts that I've chosen, from his tape to me, in the order in which they appear on the tape. It made for a somewhat shorter post than usual, so I have tacked on a few of my own items at the end. 

The first segment features DJ Bill Marlowe appearing on WILD radio, Boston, on Halloween of 1959. Here's what Matt wrote: 

Bill Marlowe was a Boston "star" who did remotes, pitched everything, and was quite the personality. The reel was marked "Marlowe aircheck" on an old reel of Irish. I have a feeling it's a tape of another tape. It was given to me by a friend who used to trade airchecks with me . I have another Marlowe check but it's MOR schlock. He jumped around a bit, ending up at WRKO radio in Boston? NYC?  I recall reading something about a riot that happened at a dance party that Marlowe was giving. He hated Rock and Roll...Silly Billy !

I will only add that this tape has been "Scoped" (that is, edited down to mostly focus on the DJ), rather haphazardly. There are longer portions of some songs than you would typically hear on a "scoped" reel, and some commercials play in their entirety while others are cut almost completely. It makes for a slightly choppy listen. 

Download: Bill Marlowe on WILD, Boston, 10-31-59

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Next up, a short tape of some guitar music, made by a young man named Lee Hazen, who would go on to do a lot of significant work in the ensuing years. Here again is Matt: 

Lee Hazen made a "demo tape" of some of his recording career since the 50's. The recording of his Lambretta was recorded on an Ampex A 122 at the ripe age of 14. After that he shifted from being a frustrated musician to a top shelf recordist  He started his career at Criteria, then King and finally ending up at Woodland sound. His first major recording job was "The Escorts" who later became the Allman Brothers .In 2002  Lee sold that first recording (master) that was a live show with the Beach Boys at Ormond Beach ,Fla to the Brothers ex roadie.  His first real paying job was with the Nashville songwriters guild working for Glen Snoddy. The two guitar pieces were Lee's compositions from his days at the guild . If you look him up on the net you will find a lot about him  He eventually had his own studio  at his house in Hendersonville 'TN Where he recorded and produced England Dan and John Ford Coley's Hit "I really want to see you tonight". We were good friends until his death a few years back.  Johnny Cash, Linda Ronstadt, Leon Russell, Lonnie Mack ,Dan Fogelberg were some of the few who he either mastered or recorded. Perhaps you recall "Little Black Egg" by the Nightcrawlers?  His neighbor was  Crystal Gayle and when I would visit he would take me to see Lawrence Welk's guitar player who lived up the street.  That cat could play at age 80!

Download: Lee Hazen - Demo Tape, 1961

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The next section of Matt's tape qualifies as our "Acetate of the Month", as it clearly originated on an acetate, even though it came to me on a tape. In the 1950's and 1960's, prerecorded ads were often recorded on acetates which would be used for a week or a month or, to promote whatever the store or business wanted to promote at that moment. I have dozens of these, Matt did not offer up anything worth quoting in this case, but indicated that he has hundreds of them. This undated acetate contains four ads for the A & P grocery store chain. 

Download: Four A & P Ads

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The next segment may be the most fascinating here. That's because it is an early television effort from Rod Serling. "Melody Showcase" appeared on WLW, Cincinnati, and Serling was one of the writers AND one of the performers on this "Let's Put On a Show" styled program. If Serling wrote the genuinely awful and campy sounding transitions here - as phony in terms of feigned enthusiasm and staginess as can be - well, then he certainly got a lot better in the ensuing few years. They come from a large amount of material Matt was gifted with after a friend who had worked at that station had died. Here's what Matt had to say: 

In a corner of the basement was a stack of paper tapes. On direction was mostly preacher talks and a few bits of choral religious singing. When flipped over, they were tapes from the skimmer at WLW. One tape dated from 1953 was "Melody Showcase", with the then-new writer Rod Serling in attendance. He started in Cincy at Channel 12 but moved to what was then Channel 4 - WLW - soon before the recording was made. He tried to be funny but you can tell he wasn't really into such campy fluff.

I think this is amazing stuff, as awful as the actual contents can be at times. Of course, "America's Got Talent" and "The Masked Singer" currently rack up fantastic ratings, so it doesn't seem like this country's overall taste in programming has improved in 70 years. 

Download: Melody Showcase, WLW, Cincinnati, Circa 1953

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The rest of that same "Melody Showcase" tape contained my favorite item from the entire tape that Matt sent me: a few minutes of rehearsal from a local show - from the same station, of course - "Midwestern Hayride". Here's Matt again: 

Midwestern Hayride was a regional powerhouse that at times rivaled the Grand ole Opry in listenership . They were a national NBC TV summer replacement I think in 1956 or so . I have about 8 tapes from the 1950's. One is from the control room of the TV station which is a real hoot. Bonnie Lou was an excellent yodeler and cut a few sides . One charted on the country charts but I can't recall when. From the early 50's to mid seventies WLW Crosley/Avco owned 4 TV /Radio Stations-Cincy, Columbus, Dayton ,Indy and a radio only in Atlanta.   Midwestern Hayride was a weekly program and always had a good book until the demise of country musical programs .

Download: Rehearsal Session for 'Midwestern Hayride', WLW, Cincinnati, Circa 1957

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Now, I love that entire segment, but far more than the rest of it, I adore the arrangement and performance of a song heard in pieces - and then almost complete - in the first half of the tape, a song called "The Lord is a Busy Man". I first heard Matt's tape about three weeks ago, maybe a bit more, and I have listened back to this particular song (the nearly complete run through) nearly every day since. I've isolated it here as a single offering in case some of you do not care to listen to the entire 12 minute segment above but might be willing to hear a two minute song if I rave about it. 

Lyrically, this is just cutesy. Presumably, these lyrics about what The Lord does every day weren't meant to be taken seriously - I'm sure the point was meant to be on the relationship with humanity. But the words are absolutely not the point for me. It's all about that arrangement. WOW. The small backing combo is rocking and swinging their hearts out, and that close vocal arrangement.... well, nearly every single word of the song has four part harmony, most of them sung with all the voices inside of the same octave. Tight, wonderful harmony, nearly all of it based (for all you musicians) around sixth chords. And I'm telling you, I LIVE FOR SIXTH CHORDS. And then those magical moments of unison shouting - especially near the end, when one of the musicians shouts out encouragement....the whole thing is amazing. I had taken an MP3 of this tape on a walk with me and when I got to this song, I was SWOONING. I mean, it just about knocked the wind out of me, and I'd be surprised if it doesn't soon notch its way into my top 100 list of all time (yes, I have such a list). 

And it's definitely the arrangement and certainly not the words: there are other versions of this song out there - it seems to date to about 1955 - and they do nothing for me. 

I hope it lives up to all that for you, dear listener. This is utter perfection in vocal and instrumental arrangement.

Download: Midwestern Hayride Rehearsal - The Lord is a Busy Man

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Thank you SO MUCH, Matt, for everything here. And folks, he's promised there's more if I want it. I certainly do. 

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And now, we're back to things from Bob's collection. I'll round out this post with two items, one VERY long and one VERY short. Sticking with the 1950's theme, here is a two hour audio letter from Mr. and Mrs. Cox to their son Billy, dated October 9th, 1955 (John Lennon's 15th birthday, by the way). Along the way, they go through myriad subjects, don't they? And that's really all I have to say about it!

Download: Barbara Cox and Her Husband - Audio Letter to Son Billy, October 9, 1955

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And as (almost) always, I'll finish with a "Very Short Reel". I have, in several cases recently, shared an excerpt from a longer reel of tape - often the only thing of interest among many minutes or hours of recording. But in this case, I've gone back to the original concept of this feature: this is from a seven inch reel which contained only a little tiny bit of tape. And on that tape was just over five minutes of a guy playing guitar. There are two pieces here - I hesitate to call them songs. During the performances, the guy playing is sort of mumbling something, but I really can't tell if he's singing a melody or just humming notes that fit with his three chords. The second seems more likely to be a recognizable song, but I don't recognize it. So if anyone out there recognizes an actual tune in either of these two performances, please let me (and all of us) know. 

Download: Unknown - A Guy and a Guitar

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Lots of Unknowns! Radiation and Calculator Demonstrations, Some Asian Television, Letters From and To Howard, Hoagy Carmichael, Safety & More

A bit of housekeeping to start: 

Thanks for all the comments on the Gary Owens tape. That's a keeper. Thanks also for the guesses as to the purpose of the "Mood Music", as well as the observation that they made have been recorded from acetates. Also, I'm informed that the anonymous "Journey Into Sound" that I posted is a famous album which was featured on a seminal hip-hop track. I had no idea. 

And with regard to the fragment of Illinois Basketball that I featured a month ago, during March Madness, Eric Carlson offered this: 

Very appropriate basketball recording as George Wilson of the winning Marshall High team went on to the University of Cincinnati which twice won the NCAA championship and just missed by two points a third in his time there. He was also on the 1964 Olympics gold winning US basketball team. He passed away last summer.

Thanks for all the comments. They consistently make my day and help make this project worthwhile. 

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There has always been a sense of mystery to some of the things I post here. I regularly attribute the performance or speaking heard on tapes to "unknown" or "unknown (this) or (that)", and now and then someone is able to chime in and give a name or a title to that unknown person or people. 

For today's post, it struck me that, by chance, most of the items I was choosing feature someone (or a group of people) that I cannot identify at all. There are exceptions, but this group of items is sort of dominated by those unknowns. 

If anyone is able to identify anyone heard on ANY of these items, I'm going to guess it's most likely that the man heard on this first piece of tape will be the one who gets identified. It's a peculiar bit of tape, listed on the box as being "Radiation - G.E. Class". See?: 

I suppose this might be Mr. Wizard - the presence of an adolescent assistant makes that more likely, I guess. But if that's the case, why doesn't it say "Mr. Wizard" (who had his own show), and not "Radiation - G.E. Class". And I checked - G.E. was not Mr. Wizard's sponsor. Regardless, it's an interesting little piece of tape, and I hope neither of the participants was harmed by radiation exposure!

Download: Unknown - General Electric Class on Radiation

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Now here's something I can hardly give you any information about at all, but maybe someone out there can decipher the piece of paper from the box, scanned below, or can understand the language here and tell us all what this is. I'm guessing this is a Japanese program, but if not, it is certainly a broadcast containing speaking and singing in some Asian language. I suspect this is a variety show. 

The rest of the tape was also in what appears to be the same language, and was almost certainly a recording of a television broadcast of a movie, but this section, at the beginning of the reel, was separated by two minute-long segments of white noise, before and after it. Then followed the movie broadcast. 

Here it is!

Download: Unknown - Unknown Asian Show

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Here's the card. The material above was on the side marked "B" (the A side was a very badly recorded concert)

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Here's a tape that doesn't fit the general theme (and again, this wasn't pre-planned, just something I noticed about almost everything I grabbed). And I could have sworn I shared this fun little tape years and years ago, but I can find no record of actually having done so. If it is somewhere out there, on this site or WFMU, maybe someone can let me know. 

Anyway, this is a direct line-in tape of a show that was broadcast at some point on the radio, a children's show hosted by someone named Larry Payne, titled "Safety Quiz". This show, as you'll hear, from schools in the Lenawee County area of Michigan, with this particular episode coming from a school in Hudson, MI. And I think that's all I need to say. 

Download: Larry Payne and Kids - Safety Quiz

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Now here's someone who is only slightly less unknown. His name is (or was) Howard, and in this Audio Letter - the beginning of which was erased, so it starts mid-thought - he makes some comments about being in the Armed Forces, and issues he is facing, and then goes on to discuss some of his favorite recent records. He then further goes on to share some of those records. This includes the fact that he is particularly taken with Louis Jordan's new style, and compares and contrasts Jordan's previous style and a somewhat more recent record, from 1952. However, other records he plays, including "Unchained Melody", pretty well date this actual letter and sharing of music to 1955. The sound quality is less than pristine here, but it's still worth a listen. 

Download: Howard Sends an Audio Letter About Being in the Armed Forces, Then Shares a Few Records

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On the flip side of this same tape is a brief audio letter back to Howard. It sounds like the recipients of the above tape responded to him using the same tape. The sound quality is decidedly better, and the lengthy is just about half of that of the above and this one is dated, confirming the 1955. As is so often the case on these early audio letters, there is considerable discussion of the actual recording of a tape and tape machines in general, before moving on to more general subjects. Another man speaks for a few minutes, and then the first man tests the microphone and sings a bit. Then it's over. 

Download: Brief Audio Letter to Howard, 7-24-55

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AND NOW!!!!

For all of you who have been waiting to hear a tape recording of a presentation in which a man demonstrates the wonders of a Mechanical Calculator - and I KNOW you're out there - here is just what you've been waiting for! This tape even has the benefit of having some interference by another recording at another speed, for the first 30 seconds or so. I'm sure I've made your day. You're welcome. 

Download: Unknown - Demonstrating a Mechanical Calculator

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Now it's time for our "Acetate of the Month". And this one keeps up the general theme of "lack of information". I again know nothing about this record, aside from that it was an unlabeled Audiodisc acetate, recorded at 33 1/3 RPM (which is fairly unusual for the acetates in my collection - most are 78s), and that it features a man with a British accent offering two bits of commentary, one called "A Cognac in the Morning", and the other, "The Gentle Art of Croquet":  

Download: Audiodisc Acetate - English Man Speaking - A Cognac In the Morning

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Download: Audiodisc Acetate - English Man Speaking - The Gentle Art of Croquet

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And finally, our "Very Short Reel" for this posting. And yet again, I've chosen something which has an air of mystery about it, in this case, the entire thing is a mystery. This short tape (just under three minutes) contains an unidentified woman singing a pompous, pretentious song, one which is also unidentified. She is singing to God about all the failings of man, and beseeching the Lord to.... well, I'm actually not sure what she is asking for.... The performance is full of spoken word segments, and the whole thing sounds like nothing so much as a Halmark label song-poem, the likes of which I have featured many times on my other blog - here are my Halmark label posts. 

Maybe someone out there knows who this is, and perhaps even the backstory. Whoever the people behind this are, they did manage to make a recording that does have something Godlike above it: It's Godawful. 

Download: Unknown Singer - Unknown Song

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The Return of KRAP Radio, A Bit of Basketball, Sound on Sound, A Good Friday Sermon, Commercials and PSA's

HAPPY EASTER!

I'm going to start with a sequel to a post I made just over four years ago, in which I shared a tape of some high school students and their fake radio station, KRAP Radio. Well, I recently found another tape of KRAP radio parody material, and thought I'd share it, as well. 

As it happens, in that post, I mention that the students involved in this project seemed to be from High School Radio Station KDBG, and by chance, I posted more material - real radio recordings, not this pretend stuff - from that station in my last post, so clearly, all of these tapes must have come from the same reel purchase, at some point. 

This is far more entertaining than the real broadcasts, I think.

Download: KRAP Radio - The Station That Is Full of It

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And here, for your further enjoyment, is the rest of that same reel - presumably some of the same kids, engaging in some reel to reel weirdness. 

Download: Material After KRAP Radio - Weirdness from Some High School Students

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We are in the midst of the annual insanity around College Basketball. I personally find the idea of caring about a college basketball team - and certainly caring about who wins a college basketball game - bizarre in the extreme. I would enjoy watching college basketball about as much as I would watching golf or soccer: 30 seconds would be more than enough, especially when one could be watching baseball, tennis or bowling (Three Cheers for Jason Belmonte!). Or streaming Monty Python episodes for that matter,

But anyway, in honor of this yearly event, and for those who do enjoy amateur basketball, here's a tape containing, within its 33 minutes of radio recordings, some moments from the 1958 Illinois State High School Basketball Final, some postgame coverage, and then a very short part of a newscast, some of which is also about that basketball game. 

Download: Excerpts From the 1958 Illinois State High School Basketball Final, Postgame and Newscast

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Now here's a tape I really enjoyed, not least because, prior to the late 1990's, every time I recorded one of my songs, I used the tape recording method known as Sound on Sound, where you record one track and then bounce back and forth between the two monaural tracks adding more sounds to your recording. Depending on the machine used, you may end up with a stereo recording in which one track alone has the final additions, or you may end up with one track which contains all but the last thing you added, and the other track which has is delayed a split second and contains your entire production, meaning your performance is in mono. The latter is the case here. 

Whoever recorded these guitar pieces appears to me to have only made a basic track and then overdubbed them once. But they are well done and, to my ears, quite enjoyable. 

Download: Unknown - Guitar Performances Using Sound on Sound, Volume 5

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Here's the list of songs you will hear, from the tape box, although the first song is not "Chattanooga Choo Choo", it's "On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe": 

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With today being Easter, and of course Good Friday having just passed two days ago, here is a brief Good Friday sermon. What makes this recording remarkable is that it comes from a reel of paper-backed tape, the likes of which was phased out as a product around 1951 or so, meaning that this recording likely comes from the dawn of reel to reel recording, and is likely somewhere around 73-75 years ago. It ends sort of suddenly, and far from sure it was over when the tape ran out, yet it also ends with several seconds of silence, so maybe it did end like that. 

Download: Unknown - A Good Friday Sermon (From a Paper Reel)

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Here is a short collection of commercials, all of which are parts of series already heard on this blog. However, none of these specific commercials have been shared - just others from the same collection, a huge collection of ads, mostly from the Pacific Northwest, which I bought a few decades ago. 

Download: A Collection of Commercials

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Here is a recording of a radio broadcast of a play written by Woody Allen, titled "God". This is a recording from legendary Chicago radio station WFMT. It starts with a very short excerpt from the play, and then the announcement of the sponsorship, a commercial, a bit of introduction, then the play. There is a break about half way through and the second half of the play. There are credits at the end. 

Download: Woody Allen's "God"

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"Mélange": noun. a mixture; confusion.

I labeled the first half (plus) of this tape "Weird Melange of Sound". See if you agree. A little bit more than halfway through this tape, we hear a moment of an audio letter, and then more randomness, before the audio letter comes back at 7:37 and we hear its contents for nearly six minutes. Most of that duration contains a woman speaking to her mother, talking about her mother-in-law and griping about someone else in her family, before requesting a return tape. 

Download: Unknown: Weird Mélange of Sound, Followed by a Short Audio Letter

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And now, our very short reel. And it is extremely short - 55 seconds - and contains someone offering up a brief tribute to the very clearly remarkable Enrico Toti, a one-legged cyclist and World War I hero who you can read about here. With apologies to Rudyard Kipling and his poem about Gunga Din, our unnamed speaker offers a re-written version of that poem, in praise of his hero, giving it three recitations in less than a minute. 

Download: Unknown: Tribute to Enrico Toti

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Some Great Jingles, London Nightlife, High School Radio, Talking to Australia, Some Cute Kids, and the Sports of 1971

HI! 

I'm gonna dive right in! Let's start with a lovely little tape which is labeled, as you can see below, "Agency Jingles - Background Music", and on the side of the box it is further labeled "# 53":

And of course, it's also labeled with a complete listing of the tracks, most of which - but not all - are in fact instrumental music for radio commercials. There are some vocals mixed in, though. I have no idea what agency created these or exactly when they are from. All of the information I have is in the scan, above. But these are great!

Download: Agency Jingles - Background Music # 53

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Now here is a bit of programming, from the BBC, that I find absolutely fascinating. It is an edition of what was apparently a weekly show, one which captured as much as possible of what was going on in world of entertainment and theatre in London. Again, this was captured on a weekly basis, with new material every week, some of it from records, but mostly recording specifically from this program. I have found, in my collection, a tape containing three episodes of this show, "London Mirror", from late in 1961, all but this first one complete (this one is missing the opening theme). The variety heard in these forty-some minutes is truly impressive even if, rather than play that icky Elvis Presley, they instead had a bland rendition of his latest hit performed by an in-house conglomeration. In fact, rock and roll music (and its creators) is conspicuously absent among the otherwise fairly broad picture of night life in London reflected in these shows. Many of you (well, me, at least) might be most intrigued by the segment featuring Goons great Harry Secombe, as this appears to be a recording of him made specifically for the show, and perhaps not available anywhere else. The person who recorded this show even cut out the newspaper ad for the program, which captures all of that variety in a very small space: 

Please let me know if you'd like to hear more of these - as I said I've found three and there may be more.

Download: London Mirror, 11/18/61

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Now, let's fly from London to Turlock, CA, some time in the late 1970's, and what was then the local high school radio station, where someone was trying - very poor attempts, to my ears - to make some promos for said station, KDBG. 

Download: Working on a Promo for KDBG Radio, Turlock High School, Turrlock, CA

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But that's only part of what's on this reel - if it wasn't, I'd have used that segment for a "very short reels" presentation. No, the rest of the tape contains an episode of another student's country music programming, including, for the last several minutes, what was apparently the stations very own mix of some odd, humorous country material, ending with a peculiar take on the country standard "Still". 

Download: Country Music on KDBG Radio, Turlock High School, Turlock, CA

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And now, here's a moment in time. I have a bunch of tapes from a professional band - nowhere on them does it seem to specify who they were, just the number of "men" in the group and the event captured on the tape - in concert at "The Elks' Ball" at the end of January, 1959. I have unfortunately misplaced the box for this one, but that's what it said, along with that reference to "nine men" or whatever it was. Their repertoire is pretty well all over the map - everything from "The Peter Gunn Theme" to "The Walter Winchell Rhumba" to "Misty" to "Oh Johnny Oh". Download this one and listen to it sometime while you're working around the house. It's about 72 minutes long. 

And again, if you dig this, let me know. I have more from this ensemble. 

Download: Unknown Band - Performance at The Elks' Ball, 1-30-59

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For those of you who enjoy Audio Letters, here's one from a man in Maine to a friend in Australia: 

Download: Audio Letter from Maine to Australia

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And now it's time for our "Acetate of the Month". And I gotta say, as brief as this is (67 seconds), it's one of the sweetest, even the most adorable, things I've ever shared here. This record scores a 10 on the "authentic cuteness" scale. It's titled (by me, anyway, there is nothing written on the disc itself) "Two Children Play-Act a Visit", and I don't think anything further needs to be said. Enjoy!

Download: Voice-O-Graph 6 Inch Recording Disc Acetate - Two Children Play-Act a Visit

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And finally, a very short reel. Here is a child of the early '70's, clearly from Pittsburgh (or at least a Pittsburgh fan), giving a short play by play of the 1971 world series, before cutting in with a bit of radio, then being generally boisterous (with at least one other child, I think) and finishing with a bit of basketball play by play. Interestingly, both the Pirates and the basketball team end up with 14 runs/points. 

Download: Unknown - Baseball and Basketball Reports, 1971

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New Year's Through and Through

Greetings, 

I hope everyone is having a lovely holiday season, whatever it is you celebrate or don't celebrate. I have a batch of recordings which all (except maybe one) have end of the year and/or beginning of the year theme. 

Here's hoping for a fabulous 2024. 

Whatever happens next year, though, it will happen without one of my favorite people in the world. Tommy Smothers died this week, and I want to just say a word or two here. That's because I think The Smothers Brothers - in addition to what they did for the expanding of boundries in television (and for letting Pete Seeger back on the air) - they were, in my opinion, one of the half dozen greatest comedy acts of the 20th century. I'm probably forgetting someone or some team, but I'd put them with Monty Python, The Marx Brothers, Shelley Berman, George Carlin and David Letterman and the staff of "Late Night" on that short list. 

And specifically for Tommy, I'd say that I'm not sure anyone ever had better comic timing or a more fully realized comic persona. And he was a hell of a guitar player, too, something that flew under the radar, but of which he was very proud. 

My favorite political site, Electoral-Vote.com has a nice write up about Tommy, saying far more than I want to here, and doing it better than could. 

Here are my two favorite Smothers Brothers tracks, both of which make my personal all-time favorite top 200 tracks ever recorded: Mediocre Fred and Crabs Walk Sideways.

Also, please keep reading after all of the new year related offerings below, as I am debuted my latest recording, a parody song I've been working on, off and on, for the last seven months or so. 

~~

Presumably, this first offering will be the most interesting to a good many of the people who are nice enough to frequent this site. It is a partial recording of the KFRC, 610 AM in San Francisco, broadcast of the top hits of 1967. This is far from the pristine (or complete) recording I'd wish it to be - the recording quality is relatively poor - noticeably bass heavy, despite some attempts at my end to rectify it, and it does not contain anywhere near the entire program, or even a single segment - it starts with # 92 and then, 103 minutes later, we hear the end of the number one song of the year. More songs were skipped than were heard. Still it's a piece of top 40 radio history, and that's worth something. 

Download: KFRC, San Francisco - The Top 100 of 1967 (Portions)

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Incidentally, if you do a search for the gentlemen (and his home town) who stamped his name onto this tape box, you will find his obituary. It popped up as the first item found for me. He was 42 years old when he recorded this. I would have thought a fan of top 40 music in 1967 would have been half that age or less. 

~~

The next two files come from the same tape, and were recorded, first, as 1955 became 1956, and then again, a much longer segment featuring some of the same people, which appears to have been recorded sometime later on New Year's Day, 1956. I do not know anything more about this tape. In fact, I digitized this tape eleven months ago, and do not actually remember what happens during either segment. So we'll all be surprised. 

Download: At a New Year's Eve Party, 1955 into 1956

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Download: A Group of Friends Goofing Around, Circa New Year's Day, 1956

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~~

In my last post, I had what I called "A Post-Christmas Tape From Canada to Lenore and Her Family in Bermuda". Well, here is a sequal of sorts, another audio letter to Lenore. My labeling of these tapes is a bit confusing, or maybe not, based on the labeling of each. But whereas the other tape was labeled "from Canada to Lenore in Bermuda", this one is labeled "To Lenore from Family in Bermuda". A quick spot check of segments of the tape does indicate that this seems to be a tape to Lenore from a different group of people than are heard in the previous tape, and these people were definitely in Bermuda, apparently from a time before Lenora lived there, or between times that she lived there. What we probably have here are two tapes to the same person from two different groups of people. 

Regardless, just as the other tape was made after Christmas, this one was made a day or two after New Year's Day. 

Download: A Post New Year's Tape to Lenora From Family in Bermuda

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And here's a tape I've labeled simply "Party - Lynn and Gene", which is probably self explanatory. I don't know that this is from a New Year's Eve party - chances are it's not - but it still fits the theme of celebrations. 

Download: Party - Lynn and Gene

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~~

And now for a Very Short Reel that I wish was longer. Although perhaps the longer version of this tape - and this segment - is readily available elsewhere, I don't know. It's a short moment from All American New Year's Day tradition. I was thrilled, a few years ago, to find a Scotch tape of the earliest design, labeled thus: 

Perhaps that's hard to read. It says Reel No. 1, Date 1-1-52, Stanford 7 - Illinois 40, Rose Bowl Game. Unfortunately, I found that nearly the entire reel had been erased with much less interesting material, leaving just 140 seconds of this football game broadcast recording. A real pity. Anyway, here it is. 

Download: The 1952 Rose Bowl Game - Short Fragment

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~~

And now for something completely different. About six years ago, something inspired me - something insistent - to write a parody lyric for the song "Up Up and Away" by the Fifth Dimension. This is not even a record that I like - not when it came out when I was seven, and not now - and although I've written and recorded parodies in the past, all but one were of records that I love. Anyway, it wasn't until April of this year that I decided to make a track of my parody. 

Anyone my age or perhaps even 10-15 years younger will likely know the song this is based on, but for those who don't, the original can be found here. 

I decided along the way that I wanted my music track to sound as close to exactly like the original Fifth Dimension track as I could possibly get out of my Midi set-up, and I think I succeeded to the point that the track sounds like a Karaoke track. It is not - I built it from the ground up, instrument by instrument. I worked on it off and on, sometimes on weekends, mostly when I took days off from work. It took me over seven months! 

I am very happy with the final product.... except that I can't settle on which prospective title is better, the one that reflects the original song's title ("Come, Come in and Play") or the one which better reflects the text of the parody ("My Curio Filled Room"). Regardless, I hope you enjoy it, and would love to hear comments, including thoughts on the better title. 

Download: Bob Purse - My Curio Filled Room (AKA Come, Come In and Play)

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Christmas Through and Through, Volume Two

Happy December, everyone, 

As I've done nearly every year since I started this project, the first post of December will be entirely Christmas related. I have four personal recordings from families or family members, and four recordings of professional presentations of Christmas material, and will go back and forth between the two. 

First up is a tape that just about defines family Christmastime. It is simply 42 minutes or so of "Fly-On-The-Wall" recording of a family enjoying the opening of presents and the joy of being together, recorded on Christmas in 1956, according to the tape box. 

(The last few seconds contain a musical performance which the Christmas recording had been erasing.)

Download: Unknown Family - Christmas, 1956

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A very different celebration of Christmas now, a professional and downright staid presentation, from the oh-so-serious and classical music oriented "Voice of Firestone", which started in the early days of radio, moved to television as one of the first regularly scheduled network shows (a very small network of stations) in 1943 (!) and lasted, in one form or another, into the 1960's. This is a recording of a TV broadcast from 1958. 

Download: Voice of Firestone, Christmas Special, December, 1958

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~~

Next, here's an audio letter from an entire family, made at Christmastime. It last just over an hour, and a whole bunch of folks get to be chatty, sing if they want, and pass along everything you could imagine to the recipient of this tape. Imagine in the days before Zoom, even in the days before cheap long distance phone calls, getting this 62 minute tape from your loved ones far away, and getting to spend an unexpected hour with them. That's one of the (many) magical things about reel to reel tape. 

The opening moments are poorly recorded, but that gets fixed after 30 seconds. 

Download: A Christmastime Audio Letter from the Family

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Back to the professional musicians! And I thought this was pretty durn keen. "Sing It Again" was a BBC Radio show which, as far as I can tell, ran at least from some time in the early 1950's into the 1970's. There's no date on this Christmas episode, but it features some very effectively arranged songs, close to half of which I'd never heard before. The Cockney-flavored song that starts at about 5:25 is particularly fun. 

Download: "Sing It Again" - A BBC Christmas Presentation

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Here's another audio letter, in this case made on Christmas and on December 26th, from a family in Canada who was recording the tape for Lenore (or maybe it's Lenora - I hear her addressed both ways here) and her family (The Abbots) in Bermuda. The tape seems to have slowed to a stop a couple of times while it was being recorded. This is just another very sweet recording from another era.  

Download: A Post-Christmas Tape From Canada to Lenore and Her Family in Bermuda

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Here's just under 20 minutes of Chicago Radio programming, from an unknown date and station, which I thought was sort of cool. The music is just from records - although for the most part ones you don't hear much these days - but between the records there are a couple of local stories, a detailed one about the delivery of Christmas trees, and a brief one about roasted chestnuts

Download: Unknown Chicago Radio Station - Christmas Programming

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And this may be an all-Christmas post, but that doesn't mean we won't have an "Acetate of the Month". This one is Christmas related. Or at least, I assume it is, as it is labeled "Xmas, 1940", as you can see below. Its contents are downright disjointed, and I cannot make out any part of it which clearly has anything to do with Christmas. It does start with someone discussing what a dad might like - which could mean Christmas - but then it goes through a man praising for a child, that child speaking about a sporting event, then a mom speaks haltingly about stars (and then some organ music drowns him out). This is a pretty weird one. 

Download: Xmas, 1940 - Universal Acetate

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And finally, our "Very Short Reel" for this post. I'm stretching the concept a bit, as I usually define "very short" as being under five minutes. But I wanted to make this post "all Christmas", and the shortest Christmas related segment I currently have is just over seven minutes. This is a tape from The Simpsons of Springfield (!) to Larry and (I think) Paul. I actually find this tape more than a bit odd. 

After a personal greeting, almost the entire remainder of the tape seems to be a copy of a recording that the sender made off of a radio broadcast - some music, Christmas thoughts from two What follows the introduction seems to be a recording of a bit of a broadcast of some music, followed by some Christmas thoughts from two different people, then some music box music. Then the sender comes back in for a moment with Christmas wishes. 

For all the time it took this person to make and send a Christmas tape to his friends, the actual contents he chose to include seem oddly impersonal. Sort of like sending a Birthday card to someone and inserting into it a bunch of pictures of other people celebrating their birthdays, instead of inscribing it with your own personal thoughts, 

Download: Brief Tape of Christmas Greetings From the Simpsons

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Blowout Post # 6

I've been doing these Blowout Posts when I'm finding I don't have the time to check and listen to stuff I want to feature. I'm also using them to make a dent in the ridiculous backlog of digitized sounds that I've made for myself (and yourselves). My "Interesting Reels" file has a sub-file named "Not Yet Used", and it has, at the moment, 376 items in it!

For today's Blowout Post, I went back to some of the older items in that folder, "older" meaning that they are sound files I made quite some time ago. I have, for the most part, not listened to these since the month I made them, which in some cases may be five to ten years ago, and I'm not going to listen to them again now (beside just a taste, in some cases). I'm just going to trust that I was right to think they might hold interest for someone, and slap 'em up there, 12 different items from 11 different tapes, plus our "Acetate of the Month". Just under five and a half hours of sound!!!

That's the story: aside from the titles and whatever I might recall about them, I am sharing these files with barely any memory of what's on them. I only know that. at some point, I thought they were worth keeping, in order to share them some day. Hope I was right! With a few exceptions, I'll have very little to say about them. 

Here we go!

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I'm starting pretty much at random, with a tape containing the sounds from part of a television production of the famous short story "The Lottery", which appeared on a TV show called The Robert Herridge Theater, from April, 1960, close to half way through the show's brief, 1959-60 run. Details of the episode are on this page. This seems to be something of a raw tape from the recording session of the second and final act of the show: 

Download: Robert Herridge Theater - The Lottery

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This one is labeled "Weird Collection of Naval and Gun Rules and Regulations", and I don't know that anything more needs to be said!: 

Download: Weird Collection of Naval and Gun Rules and Regulations

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Here are two family members, a guy and his aunt, who spent some time recording a series of old timey violin and piano square dance style songs. It seems that the man would periodically visit his aunt, who, as he mentions at one point, was around 90 years old at the time of these recordings, and they would enjoy making music together. I think I have a few tapes by these folks, but this seems to be the only one I digitized. 

Download: Aunt Rhoda and Her Nephew - Violin-Piano Square Dances At Home

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Now, if you're like me, you sit around some days unable to stop wondering exactly what are problems of small forest ownership. Yes, that's how at least five or six of my days every month were spent, until I found this tape. It changed my life: 

Download: American Forest Institute - Problems of Small Forest Ownerships

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Here's an audio letter - I don't recall any of the details, really, except that it starts with a child named Ted (hence the labeling of the "performers" of the track), that the children are heard off and on throughout, and that I found both the children's presence and the New Yawk area accents of everyone involved fairly annoying (hence the rest of the track title) - although calling it merely "annoying" barely scratches the surface. 

Download: Ted's Family - A Fairly Annoying Audio Letter

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From what I recall to have been a particularly old reel of tape - from the early '50's - here are two segments featuring a preacher identified as "Brother Brown". First, he offers some fairly typical testimony, and then he engages in a bit of Faith Healing: 

Download: Brother Brown Gives Testimony

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Download: Faith Healing with Brother Brown

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I have, in my collection, a handful of tapes featuring a Chicago radio personality named Buddy Black, who broadcast from the Edgewater Beach Hotel for WGN. I have previously featured a birthday tape he received. Here he is engaging in three on-air phone calls and stocks and finances: 

Download: Buddy Black - Three On-Air Phone Calls

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And no blowout post would be complete without..... well, at least THIS blowout post is not complete without an episode of Sing Along with Mitch. As it says, this is possibly, maybe even probably, from December 14, 1961. 

Download: Sing Along with Mitch - Possibly 12-14-61

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By this point, those who are still with me are almost undoubtably saying, "Wait, I came here to learn about Skinner Sealed Spool Valves. Where's the information about Skinner Sealed Spool Valves?"

Wait no longer. Here's part three. For those of you who missed parts one and two, there will be make up sessions in November at the Hyatt. 

Download: Skinner Sealed Spool Valves, Part Three

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Now here's a radio program about.... Radio Programs. This is one of those things were people sit around talking about how great it used to be. In this case, it's a discussion of Old Time Radio, from a year - 1964 - when what we now call Old Time Radio had only started ceasing to be about six or eight years earlier. The show was called "The Reviewing Stand" and involves a couple of stars of Old Time Radio, as well as the much beloved Franklyn MacCormack. This is the second tape in this post which originated at radio station WGN: 

Download: The Reviewing Stand - A 1964 Discussion of Old Time Radio

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It's time for an "Acetate of the Month"!!! YAY! Here's what today's acetate looks like - sorry one side is a bit blurry:

Anyway, I do not know who these jazzmen are (or were), but here's what they sounded like, on that 10 inch Recordisc, precisely four years to the day before my sister was born, on July 14, 1946. As noted on the label, these are copies of another disc, which likely explains the rather wobbly and low quality sound of the disc: 

Download: Unnamed Band - Blues At Half Price

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Download: Unnamed Band - Lady Be Good

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And as always, let's finish with a "Very Short Reel". Here, courtesy of Impact Sound Studios, is an ad for Quick and Reilly of Palm Beach. AND, nicely tying together the post, the contents of this ad hearken back to the earlier Buddy Black tape, since this deals with investments, as well as to the audio letter, since it features another person with an only slightly less annoying, fingers-on-chalkboard, New Yawk accent: 

Download: Impact Sound Studios - Quick and Reilly, Palm Beach Ad

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A Fake Newsman (and his wife), A Letter Home, A Real Newsman and His Guest, A Stereo Preview, a Kid Sings Along and More!

We'll get to today's fun in just a moment, but first, a couple of words about the last post. . 

A few commenters suggested, more strongly than I did, that Mike Starr Reading the News was definitely a demo tape. And I was also corrected that I was not hearing an echo effect, but rather, tape echo. Thanks to all those who chimed in about other aspects of the post, too. I'll try to have more of everything asked for.

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Today, I want to start with a fairly goofy tape, one some of you may find even stupid. But it's harmless, and cute, if you're of a mind to view it that way. 

But first, just in case you're not old enough - or, if you're younger, you have enough knowledge of the history of television - I'll mention that Edward R. Murrow was perhaps the foremost television news journalist of the 1950's, and if nothing else, deserves hero worship for being the person who started the end game for those opposing Joseph McCarthy.

Anyway, here we have a couple of Chicago area residents, transplanted to Gainesville, Florida, I'm assuming due to some sort of alternative prison sentence, alternately portraying not just Edward R. Murrow, but Mrs. Edward R. Murrow, too, in each case, interviewing the spouse of the opposite gender. 

Have at it, Edward and Joan Winters: 

Download: "Mr. and Mrs. Edward R Murrow" Interview Edward and Joan Winters of Gainesville, FL

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When the tape is turned over, the nature and purpose of this recording becomes clear. The jokey A-side of the tape was for the amusement of a friend left behind in the infinitely superior city of Chicago, someone named Joe. And that second side of the tape contains the following audio letter to Joe in Chicago.  

Download: Audio Letter from Ed in Gainesville to Joe in Chicago

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Now, let's go to an actual newsman, one who was almost as revered in his time as Murrow, and who was actually one of a team known as "Murrow's Boys". That would be Howard K. Smith. Some many years ago now, I bought a huge lot of tapes which included, among its myriad TV-broadcast related  treasures (many of which I've shared), a batch of raw tapes of Howard K. Smith interviews, one of which I shared back in 2018. These contain not only the interviews themselves, but also the recordings, after the interviews, done so that the camera could capture Smith asking the questions. Here's a little inside TV for those who don't know: In interviews such as these, the camera just takes shots of the interviewee. Then, the interviewee either stays or a double sits in his or her seat while the camera moves behind his/her shoulder and the interviewer asks the questions again, exactly as were asked during the interview. Then the two shots are stitched together as if the questions and answers all took place at the same time. 

The tape is labeled "Rangerone Sync", and the same phrase starts off the tape. This is apparently the name of a tape recorder brand which was used specifically to sync these recordings to the video. 

Download: Howard K Smith - Rangertone Sync - Cuban Interview with Gabriel Cardenas

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And now, yet another preview tape. In the early days of reel to reel tape, labels producing pre-recorded material were hot to demonstrate to buyers and potential buyers just what they could expect from this new wonder of audiophile-level recording. The Omegatape label was one of the first in this field, starting up in 1954, and here we have one of their earliest releases, which is little more than a series of short excerpts from the label's releases, covering several genres, with an odd segment in the middle of the tape to be used "for head alignment". 

Download: Omegatape D - Preview of Available Pre-Recorded Tapes

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Last time around, I shared another tape of some guy singing atrociously bad to the pop hits of the day, and, remarkably, I got a request for more of the same. I know I have some more, maybe of that same guy, but had trouble tracking it down. In the meantime, however, I do have a tape of someone else who can't really sing, singing along with the radio. However, in this case, it's a small child, certainly someone younger than 10 and maybe quite a bit more. The child is named Terry (or Terrie or Teri) Clark, and as opposed to that guy from last time around, I find this tape deeply endearing. But then again, I've worked my whole life in one way or another with kids, and this sort of thing was bound to resonate with me. I hope you enjoy it, too. 

Download: Terry Clark Sings Along with the Radio, 1958

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Perhaps the most "fun" item I have to share this week is this recording of the TV show "You Asked For It" from around 1954. Clearly, in the early days of television it was sufficient to televise novel events and exhibitions and have a successful show. For me, the most interesting segment here is the first one, "Basketball on Roller Skates". Surprisingly, this seems to be a "sport" which has been tried out in the early 1900's, in the 1990's, and, clearly, as is heard here, in the 1950's, without catching on very much at any point. 

Anyway, the whole show is fun, but that was the most interesting part for me. 

Download: You Asked For It, Circa 1954

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Next, for all of you who adore the dubbing tapes I've shared over the years (which are also from that treasure trove of TV reels that brought the Howard K. Smith tapes), here's another one. These are tapes of the producers and actors of a production looping in retakes of dialogue, to be overdubbed into the previously recorded scene, for whatever reason. I have no idea who the actors here are, or the production. The only thing the box makes clear is... this was recorded on a Thursday. 

Download: Dubbing on a Thursday

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And finally, our "Very Short Reel" for today, in this case, a small wisp of a tape containing an unknown news reader updating his listeners on a tragedy that took place in Tehachapi, California on July 21st of 1952. 

Download: Newscast Fragment - The July, 1952 Tehachapi, California Earthquake

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