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Topic: Who remembers what it was like the first time you heard 78's?

16th May 2023, 5:28 AM
	Break-In Master Member since Dec 2013 251 Points	I guess I was 6 or 8 years old. I discovered we had an attic in the house so, I went up to the third floor to look around and, among other things, found a rather tall stack of dad's 78's!! I'd already been HEAVILY into records since I was at least 2 so, I grabbed a bunch of them and took them down to the living room to play them on dad's stereo. It could play 78's and had the kind of needle that flips over to accommodate 78's. (It wasn't really a stereo, though. It was about 6 feet long and the record player slid out on tracks from the sliding doors across the front and the one side of this console had a woofer and the other end had at tweeter or two!! So much for it being a stereo!! It was more of a mono with widely separated speakers!!) Anyway, I couldn't wait to find out what treasures I'd come across up in that attic and sat there playing all of them to see what they were. I remember the ones I liked best were the ones with the colourful labels!! Most of them were either black, red or blue but the ones I loved were the yellow (MGM) and especially the purple (OKeh)!! Also the promo Columbia singles! I think there were 3 or 4 and most had white labels but, at least one had a soft sea green label! I don't know why but, something about that OKeh label really caught my eye! It was, Cry / The Little White Cloud That Cried by Johnny Ray. I preferred the flip side! Anyway, I guess a whole new world of music opened up to me and I really loved 78's!! I got to hate seeing them thrown away or destroyed and would eventually buy as many as I could find to see to it they had a good home and didn't end up shattered and in a dump, somewhere!! At least once a year, they'd have junk day where people would clean out their houses and toss out all the stuff they no longer had any use for and I'd spend the whole day racing all over town on my bike looking for any 78's that were being thrown out!! I remember one house on Lexington Ave. (9 blocks from my house) was throwing out a bunch but, somebody got to them before me and destroyed a few!! One was a very colourful label on Columbia featuring a cartoon caricature of Paul Whiteman on the labels! Paul Whiteman And His Rippling Rhythm. I think another was also his and had a silver label. To me, they're like photographs of historic events and the more of them that get broken and thrown away, the more of our history we've lost!! Sadly, thanks to my greedy ex-sisters, I lost at least 2000 of them a few years ago!! Including that huge stack of dad's 78's!! Thankfully, in the late `70's, after I bought my first stereo cassette deck, I decided to record all the 78's I could get my hands on, onto cassettes tapes!! As far as I know, I got all of dad's, quite a few hundred of my aunt Jean's, grandpap's, grandma's, Bill Fay's (dad's school buddy that lived down the street) and the first few hundred or so that I bought! Now, I just hope I was able to get those tapes out of the house before I was evicted!! There were at least 20 hour-long tapes and another 20 or 30 2-hour tapes. I DO still have the full list of what's on the tapes!! One of these days, if I still have the tapes, I'll transfer them to CD's or at least hard drive//SD card, etc.. Every so often, I get a strong urge to listen to that kinda stuff but, at the moment, I still don't have any of it here!