Music on demand
Music on demand. Not the content available on the radio, and there have always been radios around the place, including one with a B battery that my father kept in the ktchen. Rather, music in whatever the packaging format of the day happened to be.
Over at my grandparents, there was a small record player, in a fancy leather covered suitcase. When you plugged it in, there were orange lights inside (my uncle explained that this is where the tiny musicians performed). The records (phonograph) were heavy, and turned at 78 r.pm. (not that I ever counted). Let’s just say that the label was very difficult to read, especially for someone that didn’t yet read. I remember two hit titles: Jezebel, performed by Frankie Laine, and The Angels Are Lighting (God’s Little Candles), performed by Jimmy Boyd.
Sometime later, I learned that a 78 made a formidable fighting tool if you cracked it in half. Not from personal experience; it had been mentioned on TV, but I did manage to drop an old disc or two, and the edges were rather nasty. Enough about using music as a weapon.
Just to say that much later in life, I learned that there were record players that didn’t need to be plugged in; there was a crank, and you could play right through a power failure. Not loudly… Today, we loaded a Victrola 240 into the car, to move it to the living room (basement?) of another family member. Three decades of good intentions didn’t repair the broken spring (that the crank would have wound. And the volume control? Open the furniture doors a little wider, and sit a little closer.
Forget the portable part; it took two of us to load it out.
