MOUNT VERNON — After last week’s memorable but devastating retelling of the tragic story of little Eddie Berger, I think we could all use something a shade or 12 lighter.
In researching something else (which is, incidentally, the way I find most of my stories), I stumbled across some advertisements in an early 1920s edition of Walsh’s Directory, a sort of “Yellow Pages” of its day. These ads were for music-related devices and services, and they served to underline just how drastically things have changed in a century.
The late 1800s/early 1900s were the heyday of do-it-yourself musicmaking. It was considered a mark of quality education to play the piano, and most homes had one. Every little town had its piano teachers and tuners, and numerous stores sold the instruments as grands, square pianos (popular in the mid-1800s), spinets, and uprights.
This was also the age of the player piano, a mechanical monstrosity that banged out ragtime tunes thanks to a pneumatic system using holes in moving paper rolls that triggered an internal mechanism to depress and play the keys of the piano.
Most of all, there was an education system in those days that encouraged learning of music as a way to better yourself, a fond notion largely replaced in the modern world by multiple ways to dumb everyone down to lower and lower levels, with no rock bottom in sight.
All of this was on my mind this week because of a conversation I had at my day job (because let’s see you try to make a living writing about history and see how far it pays the bills!). I work in a retail thrift store, where one of the workers I oversee is a young pup named Rudy. Now, Rudy’s a bright boy, all of 20 years old, whereas I — having had my first colonoscopy this year — am officially old as the hills.
So, Rudy has divined that I am a source of knowledge about ancient things. Yesterday, young Rudy dug an object out of a bin of donations and looked at it for some time, puzzled. He walked over to me (because, of course, he never expects me to walk over to him: I’m 51, that could cause me to keel over).
“Hey, Mark,” he said, “What’s this?”
He held out the mysterious artifact to me. I sighed and suppressed the urge to run outside and yell at kids to stay off my lawn. The unknown mystery the boy had handed me was an eight-track tape.
I spent the next several minutes regaling him with tales of the old days, before iTunes, before mp3’s, before CDs, even before cassettes.
He looked a little uncertain about cassettes, not sure if I wasn’t just making things up.
“We’ll come back to that some other time,” I said.
I explained to him that back during the 1970s, there had been an exciting moment when it became practical to have music of your choice in the car for the very first time. Sure, there had been radio for a long time, but you were always subject to whatever whims the DJs had, back when they had DJs and not just computer-programmed playlists introduced by vacuous nincompoops.
I can say that because I worked as a radio DJ myself for a short time in the early ’90s and would spend hours crafting my playlists; and, yes, I will make an exception for our region’s glorious classical radio stations, WOSU and WKSU, who still have knowledgeable hosts who actually know their music.
OK, I seem to have wandered a bit, another telltale sign of my age …
Back to eight tracks. They were a portable music format encased in a none-too-elegant plastic box about the size (but not flavor) of a ham sandwich. It held magnetic tape that circulated on a closed loop.
There were four tracks with two channels each (for stereo sound), thus giving us the eight tracks of its name. The tracks were of a fixed length, so regardless of where a song was underway, it would have to suddenly pause for the tape to change to the next track with a loud Ka-Chunk, then the song would restart from wherever it paused.
If you missed your song, there was no fast-forwarding. You had to wait until it played around again.
This was the cutting edge of 1970s technology, and we were very excited about it, as fire, the wheel, and sliced bread had all only been invented shortly before this.
Rudy was looking a little dubious about all of this at this point, so I rushed to assure him.
“Eight tracks actually sounded a lot better than the early cassettes,” I said. “The early cassettes were very flimsy and the magnetic tape broke easily or would get eaten by machines.”
By this point, Rudy looked completely skeptical of my old-timer tales of sinister machines eating magnetic tapes for nourishment. What would he think of going back to the 1920s, and seeing these advertisements where what were later called “record players” are here referred to as “talking machines”?
The L.C. Penn Company at 13 E High Street in Mount Vernon plied these goods, as well as player pianos, books, and sheet music for all those eager piano players. They no doubt handled everything from Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag” to Beethoven piano sonatas.
The cabinet featured in the ad must be a “talking machine” cabinet. It would have played 78-r.p.m. records that could hold up to four-and-a-half minutes of music per side. It would most likely have been a hand-crank record player, unless it was one of the very first electric-powered players. Electricity was only used for recording records for the first time in 1923.
The next ad, on the following page, is for E. B. Melendy, a tuner and technician, shown in a photo at work on an upright piano. His phone number was “809 Blue,” reflecting the early practice of dividing up Mount Vernon’s telephone numbers into various districts, each with its own color.
It’s sad to think that the busy Mr. Melendy — who implores customers to call in advance, when possible — was no doubt forced into retirement within a few years by the rise of radios and passive listening, which replaced the practice of jumping in there and making the music yourself.
I’m a highly opinionated old cuss, and I’m convinced that the decline of America has a lot to do with the introduction of passive entertainments like radio and later television. But, then, we superannuated curmudgeons are known for our outrageously reactionary views.
Young lad Rudy was at least moderately intrigued by my baroque tales of olden times yesterday. He announced today that he is going to start a vintage collection of his own: compact discs.
I didn’t say a thing about the fact that one of my many side jobs is being a music critic (SeenAndHeard — International.com and MusicWeb — International.com) and thus I have literally thousands of the things covering pretty much every flat surface in my apartment.
I think it’s time to head back outside and yell at the neighborhood kids to get off my lawn. Then, perhaps tomorrow, I might try to explain to Rudy what the Yellow Pages were.
