I was given a couple of old Reel-to-reel tapes by my older brother, Jeffry, several years ago. These got cleaned out of a storage facility as my mother was going through some things. I used to do quite a bit of reel-to-reel recording and still had a TEAC 2340SX machine stored in the basement. Recently, I pulled out the old machine and decided I would try to play the 1958 tapes to see what they may contain. Back in those days, it was not uncommon to record over existing material which is exactly what I discovered with one of the reels. Although it had “April 21 -1958” written on the back, it proved to be newer than that because one side was actually a recording of the Star Trek episode “Charlie X” which originally aired September 15, 1966. I was a little disappointed.
But then I threaded up the other reel. On the back of this box, you can see the date Feb 19, 1958 written lightly in pencil. The other note refers to “our 1st recording” and something about an “accident.” At the time of this playing in Jan 2015, the reel of tape is about 57 years old. I wasn’t sure how it would play after having been stored in less than ideal conditions for so long. Would it be brittle and break up or would the magnetic coating just peel off as it passed through the machine? I planned on capturing the playback the first time I played the tape in case it proved to be too fragile for additional playback. So I started the tape. It did not snap into pieces as soon as the transport engaged. That was good. Because I was capturing all of the tracks simultaneously, one channel was playing in reverse but on the other I immediately recognized my grandfather’s (my mother’s father) voice. I stopped the tape and re-queued it to the beginning to start the digital capture on the computer. As it turns out, it was a ‘Living Letter’ from my Grandparents, Aunts & Uncles in South Dakota to our family (well, I wasn’t around at the time) stationed in France at the time and by all indications was the content as noted on the box. The tape was 1200ft long and playing at a speed of 3-3/4″ inches per second meant there was about an hour of material on each side.
There was some slight flaking of the tape coating at the tail end of the reel, but the tape made it all the way through. As I replayed the digital recording, I discovered that the audio became garbled partially through which was not how the tape actually sounded. Unfortunately, there was a glitch in the audio interface that caused this and I had to re-capture the audio again. I was very glad that the tape showed very little sign of any degradation since I would have to play it through again. It ended up taking four passes on my TEAC for a clean digital copy. Now that we had it captured I was anxious to see what tidbits of life in 1958 we would learn from it. We’ll write about that soon.
Much of his early life was documented in photo albums and boxes of snapshots taken over the years. Justin’s milestone seemed a perfect time to assemble a ‘slide show’ and I began the process of looking through hundreds of photos and scanning the ‘few’ favorites selected to share. We were looking back as he was moving forward.
A couple of weeks passed when I was surprised to find another email in my inbox from this time from Disney. It was a note from the Assistant to the Executive Director of Licensing granting us a ‘gratis’ license to use the Disney score.
it with his Mom and Dad, and some of his Aunts and Uncles joining him at the track. In fact, his Uncle Ken has been working with Monster since its founding.
On Oct 30, we were notified at 