Important Dates in History: March 17, 1981 (The Tape Recorder Incident)

Where were you on March 17, 1981? Considering we're talking about a date that was thirty-eight years ago it's likely that many people who might see this were not even born yet. But Monster Dad WAS around way back then (though still just an eleven year old Monster Kid at the time). Tuesday, March 17, 1981 seems to have been a pretty quiet news day, historically speaking. Of course it was Saint Patrick's Day. That's something. But the holiday had nothing to do with why that seemingly random date was/is so important to me personally.

March 17, 1981 was the day that I got my first tape cassette recorder! Does that NOT sound very important? Does that NOT sound very interesting? Does it seem that I'm making some sort of joke rather than relating a story about an actual "Important Date in History"? Well, it WAS an extremely important and influential thing for my eleven year old self. Please allow me to explain why.

In 1981 there was no such thing as the Internet (at least not what we think of today as the Internet). There was no such thing as streaming video. There weren't even DVDs and Blu-ray discs (two relatively recent technologies that are already looking like endangered species). Video Cassette Recorders (VCRs) were around, but they were still a relatively new (and extremely expensive) consumer product. We didn't get our first VCR until four years later in 1985. But something that WAS available--and relatively affordable--was the humble cassette recorder.

One of my older sisters (I was the youngest of nine kids in my family) had a tape recorder and I remember thinking that it was so cool that you could record your own voice, songs off the radio or anything else that you wanted to, as long as it made an audible sound. My sister would allow my nephews and I use her tape recorder to make little newscasts and other such things. The only topic I remember "reporting" on was the 1980 Summer Olympics and the fact that the U.S. was going to boycott them. While I don't recall many details of what we recorded on her machine, I do recall that the experience made me REALLY want to have my very own tape recorder! It was like a way to capture something that would normally simply happen and then recede into the depths of the past, never to be heard from again. Recording "stuff" on a cassette tape had an almost magical element to it. To me it seemed kind of like the idea of explorers finding a primitive tribe in the jungle and having the natives think that there were tiny people in the explorers' radios, or that their cameras would steal the souls of the tribe members if their pictures were taken. Am I building this up too much? Maybe so, but hopefully you can get an idea of why it seemed so important to me to acquire a cassette recorder of my very own--especially in this age of ubiquitous smart phones that can do seemingly anything and have more computing power than the entire space program that put man on the moon (or so I've heard).

There were a few times when my parents took me on special trips to purchase pretty important and special things. My first bicycle was one of those times. In addition to going to the store where the item could be purchased we would usually have dinner out and/or see a movie to really make it an event. The purchase of my first tape recorder was one of those events. I'm not sure why it was done on a Tuesday night (a school night!), but in doing some research on microfilm some years back I was able to find the ad from the Sunday newspaper that featured the tape recorder I wanted to purchase (a General Electric Model 3-5091)--and it was on sale too! I suppose that if I saw that ad on Sunday and made my pleas to my parents they might have agreed to make our little shopping trip on Tuesday (even if only to quiet my incessant and annoying pleading).

I remember going to the store to look for and buy the tape recorder, but there does seem to be some discrepancy between my memory and the physical evidence. The newspaper ad I found was for a sale at Caldor's, but I recall going to a Kmart. It doesn't really matter all that much, except for the fact that the two stores were a similar distance from our town--but in opposite directions. Either way, I did indeed spend my saved up allowance money on the treasured piece of technology, as well as a pack of three cassettes (the recorder would be pretty useless without some tapes, right?). I don't recall what restaurant (if any) we went to that night, but I do remember going to the movies to see "The Incredible Shrinking Woman". And that memory seems to be correct because the film was released on January 30, so it was very likely to have still been in theaters on March 17.

We returned home at what I'm guessing must have been a relatively decent hour (as mentioned earlier, it WAS a school night). That would more or less seem to end the story of this "Important Date in History", except for the fact that I just HAD to try out my new toy when I got home! It would be unreasonable to think that I'd simply be able to go to sleep while the tape recorder sat around waiting for me sleep peacefully through the night, go to school the next morning and come home after school to open it up. No, I took it out of the box and put the batteries and a cassette into it and... This is probably the most interesting part of the story because it's the first thing to really go wrong in this adventure. I knew exactly how to use the machine. It is a pretty simple, self-explanatory thing to operate, and I imagine that it was quite similar to the one my sister had. But the one thing I wasn't prepared for was the leader tape--which is about five seconds worth of non-recordable tape at the beginning and end of each cassette.

My very first cassette tape!

That seems like such a natural thing now, though quite possibly a completely foreign concept to all the millennials and other young folks out there who might never have seen or used a cassette tape. But these were the very first cassette tapes I had ever owned myself, so it was a pretty new concept to me. Anyway, to test it out I very excitedly pressed the Record and Play buttons to start recording and said something into the microphone (maybe "Testing, testing, one, two, three"?). Then I pressed Stop, Rewind and Play to hear my first-ever recording on my brand new tape recorder. But all that played was a bunch of silence. I must have done something wrong! So I tried it again and got the same result. Okay, let's check the volume control. Yup, that's turned up about halfway, should be fine. Let's make sure I'm pressing the right buttons. Yup, according to the owners manual that should be fine too. I made a third attempt and...nothing. The machine was getting power, the tape was moving, but I was still hearing NOTHING! And the hour was getting late. It was starting to look like maybe I got a defective tape recorder. Would I have to make my parents bring me all the way back to the store to get a replacement or refund? Would I need to send it away by mail to be repaired and then have to wait 6 to 8 weeks to be able to make my first recording? Why couldn't anything be easy?

I went to bed frustrated and confused. Somehow I managed to get some sleep, and at some point the next day I was able to figure out what I was doing wrong (basically not waiting about five seconds for the leader tape to pass through the recording head before talking) and I was FINALLY able to start recording to my heart's content. So that's pretty much the story of Tuesday, March 17, 1981--the day I bought (but wasn't able to use) my very first tape recorder. The actual recording part had to wait until after school on March 18th, and the recording part is REALLY what makes getting the device on the 17th such a defining moment for me. My tape recorder pretty much became the most important thing in my life for quite some time. There was the "new toy" novelty of the first few days and weeks. But that novelty never seemed to wear off. I didn't really have a plan for exactly HOW I wanted to use my tape recorder, or exactly WHAT I wanted to record. So I basically started to record EVERYTHING that I could! I would talk into the microphone (basically using it like a journal to either talk about something that had happened, or to recap what had just been recorded on the tape). I would record songs off the radio. I would take it outside and record the sound of me playing outside (an audio version of "Reality TV" in a way). My nephew (who got a tape recorder of his own soon after) and I would record shows--including our favorite one which we called "The Burp Show" (can you guess what that was about?). I would attempt to make various "sound effects" through experimentation. And I would tape audio from the TV. That may seem like kind of a pointless exercise since you couldn't SEE what was going on, but it ended up being probably the most important part of my recording activities for the next few years. I spent many, many hours sitting in front of the TV with my tape recorder propped up against the little speaker and my fingers on the Record, Play and Stop buttons. March 17th of 1981 was like any other day for the most part, with the exception of having one of those special nights with my parents and the purchase of a new tape recorder. But that purchase had such an effect on me for the next several years that I do feel the date is a very important one in history (even if it's only MY own personal history).

My tape recorder remained one of my favorite (maybe my MOST favorite) possessions for a long time. It was in almost constant use for about four years (the recording of TV audio came to an abrupt stop once we got our first VCR in 1985). Four years may not seem like all that long of a period of time, but to a ten-year-old four years is an eternity! I really used the heck out of that little tape recorder and eventually had to buy another one once it showed serious signs of decline. I attempted to replace it with a cheap, made-in-China knockoff unit I bought at a flea market and was so disappointed in its performance that my old GE was taken out of retirement and pressed back into service once again. But eventually it really did start to fail. To the best of my knowledge it was still working when I finally pressed Stop on it for the very last time.

But the old machine was never actually thrown away, and I was able to find it at my parents' house about nine or ten years ago. It was in remarkably bad condition--the battery cover was missing, the tape compartment cover was broken and it was dingy and covered with dust. But I had hope that it might still work. I had also managed to find the vast majority of my old tapes that had been recorded over those four or so years and wanted to listen to them on the same machine that had been used to record them. Unfortunately time and neglect really hadn't been kind to my old friend, and while it still seemed to get power with a fresh set of batteries, it simply was no longer capable of playing any tapes (much less recording on them). Because it had meant so much to me for so long I still wasn't able to throw it out. Showing it here would probably be the best way to end this post (even if I couldn't say that I was able to repair it), but after moving and selling our house in recent years the tape recorder is now somewhere among stacks of stuff in a storage unit that I don't access very often. But there IS still one more chapter to this story, and it will have to wait a little longer to be told...

TO BE CONTINUED