"The Sportsman's Friend", The Hits of 1954, A Bit of Art Linkletter, More Shortwave, "Sing Baby Sing", and More!

Howdy, Y'all, 

I have another motley batch of seven slabs of vintage reel to reel recordings for you. I'm delayed this time around by a minor eye injury which made looking at a computer screen (which I have to do for work all day) increasingly uncomfortable, meaning I did little online outside of work for about a week. It seems to be all better now. 

But enough about me. Let's hear even more about Lucky Lager. Somewhere along the road of life I managed to take possession of a whole batch of Lucky Lager related reels, and if this group of sixteen ads on the them of "Sportsman's Friend" is not the best of the lot, it's close. 

Download: Lucky Lager - 16 'Sportsman's Friend' Ads - 1969

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Next up, yet another in my now-diminishing batch of previously unshared Shortwave recordings, this one - as most of them have been - is a recording of Australian programming directed at the American market. 

Download: Australian Scene - August, 1974 (Via Shortwave)

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And now here's a tape which, under most circumstances, would have been my showcase share, right at the top of the post. It's a broadcast of some station's rendering of the top hits of the week, done in very much the style of "Your Hit Parade" in which the songs are played at random, with the ranking number given, rather than being a strict countdown. 

Two things resulted in my burying this down a few spots in this post. First, it's programming from about June of 1954, which was certainly one of the less scintillating moments for pop music in North America. But even more so, the sound quality is wretched. I mean, the shortwave recording above, is also in terrible quality, but that's expected in such a recording. This seems to have been recorded during a thunderstorm or something, and the station doesn't seem that well tuned in, either. If it wasn't for the nature of the tape - a genre I just love (the hits of the week) - I might have passed on sharing it at all. Hope you find it worth listening to, despite the quality. 

Download: The Week's Top Hits, Circa June, 1954

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Here's the relevant bit of the tape box, even if the sticker on it is inaccurate - everything here is from 1954: 

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Switching gears pretty aggressively now - and that's a good way to put it, as I'm sure this man switched a few gears in his time - here's a brief excerpt from an episode of "Art Linkletter's House Party", a wildly popular television show which ran for almost two decades. In this segment, he interviews "The Fastest Man in the World", Lt Col John Stapp. The segment does a good job of explaining that title, and if you want to read more about Stapp, you can do so here. 

Download: Lt Col John Stapp on Art Linkletter's House Party

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Are you, by chance in the mood for a bit of supper club style music? Well, if so, I have just what you've been waiting for - about 18 minutes of a guy named Jack Wells, performing in front of what seems to be about eight people at most - dropping the name of blind balladeer Al Hibbler at one point - with a handful of songs. 

Download: Jack Wells Plays a Few Songs

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Here's one sort of thing that I just love, and that I sometimes hear from others that they enjoy, as well, It's the family home recording, in this case, a bit of a hodgepodge. Adults are heard discussing the recording process itself, and having other innocuous conversations. Children sing songs and are interviewed by the parents. In between the segments are moments of older recordings. An article about a speech by Vice President Nixon is read. A statement about being unable to stop smoking follows, although it veers off into other subjects, after a while. Finally, a brief audio letter finishes the tape - although it seems odd that such a letter would be on a tape filled with family material, and that it would not be recorded on the length of tape actually needed for what the guy wanted to say (it runs out, mid-thought). 

Download: Recordings Around the House

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And finally, our "Very Short Reel" today comes from the Mountain Home Schools of Arkansas, where, at some point, there was a production of a show called "Sing Baby Sing", and here we have three promos for that show. 

Download: Three Promos for the Mountain Home Schools' Production of "Sing Baby Sing"

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Vintage Talk Radio with Michael Jackson and Much, Much More

So here's what happened the day I made my last post - later in the afternoon.

I went into the basement and found a moderate size puddle of water, not far from one of the two sunken window wells - the access spots all basements have to have. I assumed, at the time, that we had some sort of seepage - it's happened before, and since very little was on the floor in that area, and not much had been damaged, I figured we'd address it later, and be aware that it might continue to happen.

Two hours later, though, the puddle was twice as big, and as it wasn't raining at that moment, I thought something else was probably going on. And I was right. A pinhole leak had developed in the pipe carrying away the water from our washing machine. A steady, pin-thin torrent was coming out, straight towards the floor, every time we ran the washing machine. And it was directly over one of my shelves full of tape. Not only was it spewing forth at that moment, it had done so at least twice in the previous two days. The direct hits and the splashing hits had managed to damage parts of 16 large stacks of tapes- varying from completely drenched to a little bit moist.

I eventually hustled the tapes upstairs and put them in the garage to air out and dry. Some were fine the next day, others took several days.

Here's what the garage looked like:

And the other angle:

TI do have a contraption that dehumidifies tapes (because of the existence of something calls "sticky tape syndrome" which affects some reels produced in the '70's and '80's - some of you may know about this), so everything should be okay, to varying degrees. I had not yet listened to all of these tapes. 

And I must say, it looks like a much bigger collection when laid out like that, then it does when on a shelving unit. 

And that brings up another point that you might find interesting. The above reflects about 15-16 stacks of tapes. I have roughly six or seven times that many stacks in my basement that are as of yet unheard by me, in addition to those shown above. It seems I need to "get a move on". 

At some point, I may need to enter into conversations about who would want to carry on with these tapes if and when I'm no longer able to (I actually tried to engage the Library of Congress about this a few years ago, when I was in conversation with a staff member about something entirely different, but as soon as I brought up this collection, the staff member broke off contact). 

Thoughts about any and all of this are welcome. But anyway, the last week of August was a challenging one for me and for my reel collection. 

And now: 

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One of the more interesting things I came across lately is a segment of talk radio from the mid 1960's, version of the format which has been utterly unknown outside the realm of public radio for at least the last few decades. It's hosted by an erudite English fellow named Michael Jackson (no, of course not that one - THIS one), and it was recorded, as the box says, on October 12th, 1964, not long at all before KHJ jettisoned its adult oriented programming - which was apparently quite something - for Top 40 Radio, the following spring. 

The writing on the box is sort of a mess, but it does confirm what I just wrote: 

And here's the segment, which, as I alluded to, I find fairly fascinating:, both for its style and for the variety of subjects discussed at a fairly critical moment in U. S. History. It starts with a segment of a newscast, but from the one minute point on, it's the Michael Jackson show:  

Download: Michael Jackson on KHJ, Los Angeles, October 12, 1964

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So while we're on the topic of radio, which I know is a favorite for many readers/listeners to this site, I have a really neat collection of ads for Lucky Lager, from 1969, another tape from a collection of Lucky Lager-related reels that I managed to pick up... somewhere. These eight ads - more like sponsorship promos, as they are each about three minutes long - are from the "Sportsman's Friend" series, and they feature short profiles of people and/or places. These were produced by the very well known BBDO, Inc., and are from 1969, facts I learned through careful research and detailed study of the tape box: 

And here's the reel: 

Download: Lucky Lager - Eight "Sportsman's Friend" Features

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Another collection I picked up along the way features, on several of its tapes, Telephone Company related material. I have featured several of these reels in the past, and here is another one, featuring "25 simulated telephone conversations", meant to help train phone "toll traffic observers", presumably to help them learn how to help make sure calls are loud enough to be heard but not so loud as to be uncomfortable.

The content of the fake calls is quite entertaining at times. 

Download: 25 Simulated Telephone Calls

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So every now and then, I like to throw in something either dull or annoying or otherwise difficult to listen to, to give all of you a fuller taste of the nature and variety of the tapes I come across and listen to in order to provide enjoyment for all of us. 

This tape is mercifully short but has little to recommend it, to my ears, despite being one of those, usually precious home recordings, and what's more, a home recording of a child. However, this one is extremely badly recorded, and primarily features the child trying to demonstrate the newest song she (Vernisha?) has learned on piano, one which she hasn't actually really learned yet. 

The opening greeting is cute, as is her response when she is called to clean the dishes. Following that point, she returns, and I absolutely cannot make out much of what's she's saying over the next 45 seconds - it may be gibberish, or it may be in another language, or it may be an assumed accent, but the distorted sound doesn't help. In the last 35 seconds, she becomes more intelligible. And then it ends. 

If the whole tape was this kid talking as at the end, and was recorded well, it would probably be gold. But in this form it's fairly hard to listen to. Maybe you'll feel differently...

Download; Unknown: Bad Piano and Rambling Talk

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And finally, as always, our very short reel. Today's reel features two ads for "Kingsbury Homes", wherever those were sold. One has the sales pitch from start to finish, and the other has a music bed for what would have been a live read over it. 

Additionally, a bit more of tape was left on the reel, and it contains very brief segments of three other recordings in quick succession over less than 12 seconds, at the very end. This tape clearly was used multiple times before the Kingsbury Homes ads were recorded. Sort of an interesting little medley of sounds...

Download: Two Kingsbury Homes Ads (and a bit more)

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It's been a while since I digitized that one, and I don't quite know where the box is, so I don't have a scan...

Honolulu Top 40 Radio, 1963, A Paper Reel, and Vintage BBC Shows

A little story first - if you're not interested, feel free to move on down to the newly shared files, below the break.

Earlier this month, I experienced a personal crisis related to this site. I don't want to overstate this, because there are true crises and tragedies happening throughout the country and world right now, but this is something that would have made me quite sad, and would have impacted this site.

All of my sound files are housed on an external hard drive, one which is not very old. At the beginning of the month, it began failing. I started copying things to a cloud site (which I should have done before) while looking for a potential solution, and while I saved my song-poem files, it died before I moved anything I'd saved for this site (as well as many other files I only had in MP3 form, on that drive).

You see, I have a backlog of stuff for this site, and every time I post, it's a mixture of stuff I've just discovered and things I've been sitting on for months or years.

Happily, my neighbor - one with whom we are on excellent terms - owns a company within which transferring data to a new drive would be right up their alley. But.... he told me right off the bat that it was 50/50 that they'd be able to do anything, depending on what was broken about the drive.

I spent a restless week worrying about this, but just got the word that everything was saved. YAY!

In the meantime, I am working from home 80% of the time, which has given me the opportunity to digitize a stack of stuff that's been sitting, waiting for me to do so. I sit at my laptop at one end of the room, and the reel machine (near) silently sends the tape into the recording software, only giving me a sign to get up and change it when the tape runs out.

So it is that I have a bunch of stuff to share with you today, anyway, all of it newly digitized, while I wait for the return of my other material, on the brand new-and-improved hard drive that I just bought.

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So last time around, I was already in this "stay-at-home-and-digitize-at-the-same-time" mode, and the one item from that project which made the post was the Lucky Lager sales promotion. The next tape in that particular stacks (and oh, do I have stacks...) also had a Lucky Lager tie-in, and it is about as wonderful as it can get.

For what we have here is "Lucky Lager Dance Time", just under an hour of Top 40 radio programming from Honolulu, Hawaii, back on April 16th, 1963 (coincidentally, my mother's 40th birthday!). I'm guessing that tapes of early 1960's Top 40 radio from Hawaii are extremely rare (although I really don't know). Whether or not that's the case, this tape is wonderful.

Among all the standard hits of the day one would expect to hear from any American Top 40 station in April of 1963, there are a few tracks which seem to have been local hits, two "triple plays" for prizes, and a number one record "Sukiyaki", which wouldn't be number one nationally for another two months - it's not surprising that Hawaii would be at the forefront of this song's popularity in the US, given the large percentage of Hawaiian residents - then and now - who were/are of Japanese descent.

I also get a kick out of how many times, while talking at some length, the Deejay mentions that this is the station to listen to for less talking and more music.

The name of the station - KPOI, referencing the mainstay of the local cuisine - cracks me up, too.

Great stuff!

Download: Lucky Lager Dance Time - KPOI, 1380, Honolulu, April 16, 1963
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Next up, and very simply explained, is a set of two episodes of a show from the BBC, a show which could hardly be more British - full of explanations, assistance and other helpful information, all in response to listener queries.

I don't have a specific date on this, but the other material on the tape - which I will share another time - appears to be from 1961.

Download: BBC - Can I Help You - One Episode
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Download: BBC - Can I Help You - Another Episode
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And speaking of two episodes of a show on one tape, here's something really old. What you're about to hear is the complete contents of a paper reel - one of those Scotch Brand reels which sports the very first design available from the Scotch company, which I shared here. That's a box that most likely was phased out by 1950. This particular one sports its original price tag of $3.50, meaning that a single reel of tape in that era cost the equivalent of between $35 and $40 dollars in today's cash.

And what did this person choose to record? Well, at some point (it would appear), he recorded a broadcast of a Boston Pops concert, as the end of the reel features a couple of minutes of that show, complete with a commercial and barely any music.

But at two points in 1953, he recorded episodes of an NBC network show - as broadcast on a Minnesota station - titled "Critic at Large", and featuring Leon Pearson and his erudite, very sedate yet often cutting commentary on any number of things one can be a critic about and for. The first segment is undated, but multiple references put it squarely in April of 1953. For the second one, the owner of the machine helpfully dates it for us. When that one is over - that's when we hear what was being erased - the Boston Pops.

As far as I know, there is nothing remotely like this on radio or TV now, although I certainly remember such things within my lifetime, mostly prior to my adulthood, though (late 1970's). It's interested to think what the response to this sort of program of criticism and comment would be today. Blank stares, mostly, I'm guessing.

So let's travel back to a certain  very different point in time, for a very different kind of broadcasting:

Download: Leon Pearson, 'Critic At Large' - Spring, 1953 (KSTP, Minneapolis)
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Download: Leon Pearson, 'Critic At Large' - July 12, 1953 (KSTP, Minneapolis) (And a Bit of The Boston Pops)
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And if you want a sort of aural whiplash, from the sedate BBC of the early '60's and the suave and educated criticism of NBC in the early '50's, here's my very short reel of the day, an undated (I'm guessing 1980's) hard selling 30 second ad for a grocery store in northern Arkansas.

Download: Harps, Mountain Home, Arkansas, 30 Second Ad
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Watch the Belgian Parade with some Lucky Lager!

I have another batch of interesting and widely varying tapes today!

I've periodically shared slide show narration tapes, and today I have one that is actually a bit of a mystery. Because first, I'm not sure this is a narration for a slide show or for an 8 mm home movie presentation. And second, because the subject matter seems to change without announcing itself partway through the material.

The first section of the narration is clearly for a parade featuring Belgian-Americans (and possibly the King of Belgium - see below), but then at some point we've clearly moved on into a tour of one of the many world's fairs which occurred in the mid-20th Century - I'm guessing the one in New York in the 1960's, but maybe the clues on this reel will steer a listener in another direction.

Narrating a slide show makes much more sense to me - my experience with film is that it is awfully hard to line up such a narration with the film and have it work every time, with a pre-prepared recording. Yes, I've actually done this, back when I was 14, with some of my family's home movies. But some of the announcing certainly sounds like it's related more to moving images than slides. Hear for yourself!

Download: Slide Show or Film Narration for a Parade and World's Fair Visit
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And here, as an little added attraction, is a fragment of recording which was contained on the very next box I opened from this collection. This is the end of a radio interview, with a connection so poor as to possibly be a short wave broadcast, interviewing someone who was at a Belgian Reception, mentioning the presence of the King of Belgium, and wishing that more Belgian-Americans had been present.

Whether this reception is connected to the parade documented on the other tape is unknown. That this reception was in Detroit complicates that idea, since the parade seems to have transitioned into an event that I believe to have been in Detroit.

I do love my listeners/readers, though: you've come through many times with solutions, based on things I missed, or didn't have time to research.

Download: Brief Fragment of Conversation about Belgian Reception
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I'm not a drinking man, but I still usually recognize the name of a beer when I hear it. But Lucky Lager was a mystery to me. It seems to have been far more common in the western states, and I have never lived outside of Illinois, so maybe that's why. But it seems to have been massively popular, wherever it was enjoyed, in the 1950's and early 1960's, at least.

And it was in the early 1960's - late 1962, for use in 1963 - that Lucky Lager sent out the following promotional tape to its dealers, and who knows who else. I find this tape highly entertaining, except for the sections where they literally repeat portions of it again, most notably the upcoming new radio ad promotion featuring future game show stooge Jaye P. Morgan, complete with her introductory comments, twice.

Despite that bit of repetitive weirdness, this is a fun tape. One more thing: there is a moment where they were apparently going to insert some other sort of recording or presentation, and there is a moment of silence
instead. The brand was apparently flying pretty high at this time, but not so much by the end of the decade.

Have a listen!

Download: Lucky Lager - 1963 "Lucky Days" Sales Promotion
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Finally, here's this week's "very short reel", chosen at random from a few large stacks. This is a late 1990's radio ad - two promos for use on one specific day, due to the content being related to that night's TV broadcast, on the local Toledo Fox-owned station, promoting both the news, and that evening's rerun of the never-less-than-aggressively-and-painfully-unfunny Home Improvement. 

Download: Two Fox News and Home Improvement Combo Ads

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