Remember when the family all sat down for dinner together?
Remember when the family all sat down for dinner together?
We HAD to eat all we were served, because there were people who were starving in other places across The World, and/or, because some of us had to eat grass and dig up tulip bulbs and eat them, when The German Army took almost all the food out of the country in late fall of 1944.
I breathed a sigh of relief when I asked my mom what the holiday plans were because she told me that this year, we couldn't have our traditional family dinners. Some of the youngsters might be unhappy but I wear a mask continually when I visit and don't want to risk my parents' health. With that being said, my brother and sister-in-law are flying out from Vegas for some reason and I hope they're not trying to convince the folks to have a get-together.
Amen. Even as there are a bunch of selfish oafs who refuse to take necessary steps to get this thing in control. It doesn't matter if one state does everything right because there are always people who push against the common good because of "individual liberty". I live in Ohio, where we tried to keep it in check but border Indiana and West Virginia, where they aren't. It's like smoking, you can't have a non-smoking section in the same room, right next to a hookah bar.
We are the at-risk elders now and don't trust our family members to
honor all the recommended [[by the scientists) safe measures . I have only
seen my brother once all summer and that was outside with masks on.
Now they are fixing to drive from Michigan down to Florida for the winter -- fools.
I am somewhat relieved that my parents never had to live through these times. They
never made it to experience America's World Trade Center, et al, attack, either.
Jerry, we are your Michigan neighbors, and we are surrounded by the spiking states.
We aren't allowed into Canada, either.
Last edited by 9A; 10-17-2020 at 11:07 AM.
This is a very relatable thread. Thanks for perpetuating it. It is fun to go back and read previous pages. How many of you remember the song "Remember When" by the Platters in 1955? I know this is not "Word Association," but I associate.
That makes me remember when I discovered my dad's records in earnest. I had already built up my own collection [[kind of) in the late '70s and '80s but I started throwing his anthologies on my turntable and just like that, my buds and I were making mix tapes with the best of the '50s and '60s to drive around to. We were so weird. We'd pop out a tape with Keith Sweat, Parliament and Lakeside on it and trade it out for one with Little Richard, Sam Cooke and the Temptaions without missing a beat.
I used to love making mix tapes. I had a cassette player in my car until it wore out sometime around 2008.
Little Richard, Sam Cooke and the Temptations? Your dad was pretty cool, Jerry.
You guys are awfully young! My Dad had records by Duke Ellington, Count Basie, T-Bone Walker, Wynonie Harris, Joe and Jimmy Liggins, Champion Jack DuPree, The Ink Spots, The King Cole Trio, Benny Goodman, Glen Miller, Tex Beneke, from the 1930s and '40s, even a few from the 1920s.
Robb, Jerry's dad must have been a contemporary of mine. That is my music of the
Fifties and Sixties -- when music was music. Rock and Roll, Doo-wop, etc., etc.
However, I love your dad's taste in music. Yes.
Dad's record stash has a lot more than that. He's got stuff from the Ink Spots and the Mills Brothers. Pops is a huge Dominoes fan and proud to remind me that one of his first cousins was a member of the Five Keys. He started buying albums in the '60s but he had 45s from way into the '50s. Even a couple of 78s. One of the things that I would fix if I had a time machine would be how the 45s were maintained. We had hundreds of them and now the few that remain are broken and scratched beyond use.
Do you mean 45's like these? Framed on our wall. Shameless.
Last edited by 9A; 10-19-2020 at 08:20 AM.
Ralph's band of yore. [[RT is tall dude in back on right)
Sorry, Homeboy. But for as much as I loved making cassettes, it took two and a half hours to make a 90 minute tape. Now? I can put 130 songs an mp3 CD that I can put in my car's stereo and drive from Ohio to Virginia and back without hearing the same song twice. And that will only take 45 minutes to collect the music, organize it and burn it to the CD.
If I don't want to use the mp3 CD, I can plug in an mp3 player to the stereo and have 10,000 songs from which to select. The only real thing that I miss from that age is the fidelity of wax as opposed to digital.
Haaaaa,hey jerry remember the old muffler commercial where the old dude said..i'd never trade annabelle...that's me with my cassettes,hehehehehehe!!
OK, Jerry. I never saw a 45 that looked like that blue one. Ours always had that
big hole and we put an insert into it to adapt to our phonograph spindle. Does anyone know why most 45s were produced with the larger holes?
Last edited by 9A; 10-19-2020 at 07:02 PM.
Hah! I didn't even notice the hole. Ours used to have the wide holes in them too. I can remember 10 singles loaded up on the console with one of these adapters:
For some reasons, it's the little things that stick with you decades later.
I do believe that the smaller 45 hole were for jukeboxes.
Right! 7-inch records that had the small 78RPM and 33RPM hole, had that because Juke boxes were first made for 78s, and, later, 33 RPM LPs were also played by some Juke Boxes. So, rather than need to accommodate a new record hole size, they just made 7-inch EPs with microgrooves and 3 songs per side, with the small hole, or singles with a small hole, to play in the Juke boxes. But, most of the US and Canadian Juke box records I remember when 78s were phased out during late 1958 through 1960, were the 3 songs per side 33 RPM EPs.
I love old fashioned juke boxes with actual moving parts. Some were works of art. Do any of you have one? I have a friend whose family still owns one that used to be in her rec room in the Fifties.
I found this interesting --
"Jukeboxes were most popular from the 1940s through the mid-1960s, particularly during the 1950s. By the middle of the 1940s, three-quarters of the records produced in America went into jukeboxes.Billboard published a record chart measuring jukebox play during the 1950s, which briefly became a component of the Hot 100; by 1959, the jukebox's popularity had waned to the point where Billboard ceased publishing the chart and stopped collecting jukebox play data."
Last edited by 9A; 10-20-2020 at 06:22 AM.
I read somewhere in Wikipedia that the smaller 7 inch records were originally produced
for children. Perhaps the larger holes were also intended for children to manage -- like fat pencils and crayons. I realize not everything published on Wikipedia is gospel. Does
anyone know some other reason why the 45s were produced with the larger center holes?
Jerry, I cannot, for the life of me, figure out how that 45 rpm adapter, that you featured earlier, was used. I do remember the cylinder-like adapter that was placed on a record player for a stack if 45s.
That disc-shaped 45 adapter was pliable, so you pushed the open ends inward to get it inside the hole, and once inside it snapped back towards the outer direction, and fit snugly inside the hole, being held fast by the edges of the record which formed the circle. It snapped into place and was held fast until the user would pop it out again. There were strong, metal discs, at first. But they would break off small chunks of the record's centre area. So, they stopped making those. That is why so many 45s in 1950s collections you find in thrift stores or used record bins in furniture stores have ruined centres. Those were generally the same people who wrote their names on the label or stuck a sticker with their name on it on the label. They were careless with their records, and so, were not real collectors. They just wanted to go home with all their own records when they brought them to parties.
Most people had one flexible plastic discs for each 45 and left it in there. The metal adapters were dreadful.
Remember when we would carry those 45's around with our little record players and poof-instant party?
You are so young, R&B. We were lucky if we had a Hi-Fi. I think mine was gotten with Gold Bell Gift Stamps. Darn, I just got rid of the dust collector in my basement not-too-many years ago. WebCor. Kept the albums with wonderful covers.
Do you all remember the round flat little velvety things that dusted off the records while they were spinning?
Last edited by 9A; 10-20-2020 at 12:39 PM.
Haaaaaaaaaaaa,well thank you very much 9a,it's been a long time since anyone called me young[my grand kids would get a kick out of that]yes i remember those velvety things.
I remember trying to figure which hundred or so albums in peach crates would be good enough for a four hour party. Somebody always asked for something that I didn't have and walked away in disgust when I told them. Then, I could take twice as many CDs with me. Once, I spent a day burning 20 CDs with 12-15 songs each on them. Also took another hundred or so with me. Some guy walked up and asked me if I had Rapper Dapper Snapper [[which I had never even heard of) and walked away in disgust when I told him "no".
You can't win. Anyway, now I have probably 40 or 50 thousand songs on my laptop and although I'd be more prepared, I have no doubt somebody would be disgusted by what I don't have. With that said, if there's wi-fi, I can download almost anything, so there's that.
I guess we weren't as rich. Most of us only had a dozen or two records. Some
had less.
I wasn't rich, but I did have a goodly amount of money as a kid from working in my father's store. But, I rarely paid the full discount 59¢ for a single. I scarfed up barrels full of 45s at thrift stores, junk stores, furniture stores, Woolworth's 10¢ sales, bargain bins in record shops, rarely paying more than a dime for them [[sometimes a quarter if they were hard to get or in mint shape). I probably averaged paying about 7¢ a 45. I got my first records for my 7th birthday [[my parents paid full price). But, soon after that, I happened to be along with my mother at a thrift shop, and noticed they had used 45s for 10¢ a piece. I found about 38-39 oldies [[early '50s R&B hits from someone's collection) I put them into a box. There were several impatient people in the line, and the checker didn't want to bother counting them one-by one, so she said, "Just give me $2.00 for the whole bunch." So, I got them for about a nickle each. From then on, I was hooked on bargain record shopping, and was able to amass a large collection I never could have afforded at retail prices. I also made friends at distributors, and got a lot of new records for 40¢ and later 50¢.
My kind of shopper. Nowadays I am more interested in album covers than the
albums, since I have no turntable. I have framed a few. The Graduate, Kingston Trio
and Peter, Paul and Mary. The covers are wonderful.
A few years ago I found an album of Chubby Checker at the Salvation Army for $.10.
I gave it to Ralph's grand-daughter who had a record player. She had never heard of
him. I think it was called "Let's Twist Again." I found something under the Motown
label, but it wasn't memorable. I just liked the label.
Last edited by 9A; 10-20-2020 at 03:35 PM.
Me too 9a,i just don't have room enough for all the collages i want to make,like the wall i wanna make for the temps called-emperors of soul!
I was supposed to create a grouping of framed black and white photos of Ralph's band or recording days. Never happened. Hard to find a wall to put it on. Hard to sort through
all the photos.
We weren't rich. But I bought my first record soon after getting my driver's license and took off from school at lunch one day to go to the record store. I was hooked immediately. I worked at McDonald's before getting a job at a grocery market and for the better part of the next 15 years, I bought between 2-5 albums every payday. I could spend an hour in a record store and come out with only one disc, especially the used record store that I used to patronize on Ohio State's campus. As close to nirvana as I came in my youth.
Guess what, Jerry, McDonald's didn't exist when we were teens. The first one I ever saw was on U of M's campus. Hamburgers were $.15. Strictly carry out. Of course, minimum wage had just gone up to $1.
I never lived in an era without McDonald's. One of the best promotions in history used to be one in my hometown [[and elsewhere?) where Mickey D's would comp school kids a cheeseburger if they got an A on their report card or a hamburger if they got a B. Every report card resulted in me nagging the folks to drag me out for my free sandwich. Of course, McDonald's knew that parents would bring the tots to the restaurant and for every free hamburger, there would be at least two fries, two drinks and a large sandwich sold.
If I was a millionaire, I'd give kids vouchers for hamburgers when they got good grades [[just after buying laptops for the kids who don't have them for virtual learning).
If I were a billionaire, I would offer free college to deserving kids. Of course,
the incentive would have to be dangled very early in life and much assistance of
all kinds toward education and self-confidence. Maybe counsel the young parents.
Interest in music and participation is paramount. It has been proven that kids
in poorer areas of the world thrive emotionally when they learn an instrument
and play in a band. They live for it.
More simply, even singing together is uplifting, but little kids need be
embraced in so many ways.
Last edited by 9A; 10-21-2020 at 08:15 AM.
I love hearing about rich people sponsoring classes the way Oprah sponsored a second grade [[I think) class in Chicago. She promised them all free college if they maintained good grades and graduated. Then, LeBron's academy in Akron is also a stunning endeavor. I wish more would do things like that.
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