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The Year: 1954Having been born in November of 1947, I was but a wee lad of just 6 or so. Dad had only recently brought home the new Montgomery ward radio-phono console—and what a beast it was—taller than it was wide, and twin doors that covered everything contained inside. The cabinet, of course, was mahogany—real mahogany wood, not that fake painted-on stuff that would prove popular only a few years later.
The electronics inside were quite up to date considering that stereo was several years off. There was a radio (we surely didn’t call them receivers yet), featuring not only AM but that new-fangled FM band. Never mind that this was Western North Dakota 60 miles from where the nearest town of any size Minot was (population about 22,000 then as I recall), and there were no FM stations—it would be 10 years or longer before any FM stations came on line with enough power to reach 60 miles out—as I recall that didn’t really happen until after I went to college in the late 1960s.
Then there was the record player part. A three-speed unit with a turnover cartridge, it played the old 78s taken from true phonograph “albums”, but also the 45’s becoming popular then, but also the recently available mono 33 1/3 rpm records. Most of the ones we had about then were 10 inches not 12 inches in diameter, and they represented a vast improvement over the scratchy sound of the old 78s, including, of course, a nice recording of “Clair de Lune.”
Of course, what I used this mostly for was to play my large and rapidly growing collection of 78 rpm “golden” records. I went through these over and over again. These were the MP3 players of the day. Much later on, in the mid-late 70s, my niece (who was born in 1970) seemed to have the same childhood fascination with these little golden records I had and she kept playing them over and over too despite the scratches that had accumulated during my play time. Sometimes it’s funny how genes work!
There was a single 8-inch mono speaker at the base of the unit. Later on, in the early 60s, I modified the record player to play stereo, but that is another story.
We had moved into a newly-built house on the farm only about five years earlier, the first place we had lived in with electricity, and we now had a refrigerator and electric stove (both Philco) as well as a fine radio and record player. Black and White TV was still 3 or 4 years off. That refrigerator lasted well into the 80s.. The floors were real linoleum, not that goofy vinyl stuff they have nowadays. And I remember the couch—mom called it a davenport and the term couch was unheard of. It had a rather strange looking wine colored fabric that looked something like a modern velvet, but not exactly either. Pull-down roll-up shades on every window, made from coated paper, not vinyl.
Living room walls painted dusty rose from the Kem tone paint line. Somehow, mom somehow favored Dusty Rose as a wall color—I think she painted the walls the exact same color over and over again, and it was not until about 1970 when she started experimenting with light green as a color—that was after she installed the dark green carpet in the newly living room (built in 1966) and what had been the living room in before became the Dining room. The green carpeted living room at the time was considered quite a step up from the linoleum of the 50s and early 60s. For fans of Kem Tone and Kem Glo paint, Kem Tone was flat, but Kem Glo was semi-gloss—the latter went into the kitchen, a kitchen that always ended up being pink.
Follow Ups:
1954 - The year my family moved to 2212 Crest Road (Mt. Washington, Baltimore, Md.). Also the year commie-baiter Joe McCarthy met his match in the form of a 60-something attorney named Joseph Welsh. Welsh's "At long last senator, at long last have you no sense of decency..." speech fell on my 5th birthday (6/9/54). Also the year Balto. got a major league baseball team and the public schools were integrated.
Now you're talking. 1954 spanned my Junior and Senior years in high school. I had built a Grommes 3 tube kit the year before and lusted for something better. I was 16 and driving age in NJ was 17. Dad was giving me driving lessions and getting very frustrated.My buddy Charlie's uncle gave him a 1938 Chevrolet coupe. His Dad said he could keep it if he rebuilt it himself. Charlie's Dad was a former Ind car mechanic and owned a large garage, parts business and machine shop. (there was a midget racer with a Ford V-8 60 engine in one corner with a tarp over it) Charlie enlisted my help and we spent the entire summer rebuilding that old Chevvy. All the facilities we needed and advice from experienced mechanics. Charlie was older than me and got his license that fall.
That was a memorable year.
Wow! I was 12 for heavens sakes!! I had an old RCA radio chassis in my room that I found in a junk yard for 50@! I wrapped literally a couple of hundred feet of baleing wire around the walls for an antenna....(Ma was sure the house would get flattened in the next thunderstorm) but the radio had a SW band so I used to pull down the shades and close the curtains late at night...turn the volume down real low and tune in on Radio Moscow! I half expected the G-men to come busting in at any minute to drag me off to prison for my unpatriotic pursuits....:) Pretty heady stuff for a dumb kid in the wilds of Vermont! That radio was the greatest thing though....on a good night I might get an AM bounce all the way from Chicago....and how I loved listening to Jazzbo Collins live from the Purple Grotto in NEW YORK CITY!!!! Twas Friggin magic...:)! Walt
Tuubvac, Al "Jazzbeau" Collins ended up on KSFO doing overnights, back when KSFO was still "the world's greatest radio station, particularly in San Francisco". Don't know if he did gigs for KJAZ, as their signal rarely reached Sactown, but he did shifts for KCSM until his passing a few years back. Great humour, great music, great dude from all accounts!!!
...that WTVA TV station in Tupelo, Mississippi started broadcasting. I heard Al Roker say that this morning and congratulated them.I remember it well. I was a boy in NW Alabama. Everybody there with a TV could only pick up Birmingham or Memphis stations - barely. To us, all TV was snowy. Before that new station started - it was called WTWV then - they showed a test pattern with no sound for two weeks. Every family sat around and watched that test pattern. I'm serious. They would call in neighbors to show it to them. "Have you ever seen a picture that clear?!"
If the B&W test pattern was perfectly circular your TV set was adjusted right. Ours generally was anything but round and instead had the shape of a pear or egg.Then later they had a color test pattern with a yellow bar that invariably ended up lime green--at least on our 1966 set
Dave
Later Gator,
Crank up your talking machine, grab a jar of your favorite "kick-back", sit down, relax, and let the good times roll.Eagles may soar, but weasels do not get sucked into jet engines.
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