It came in the mail yesterday. A real blast from the past - a Teac 4010 SL reel to reel tape recorder. I was like a little kid ripping it from the box - but very carefully. I was expecting something special based on the words that drove me to bid on this unit (on ebay for you the uniitiated). The seller did a pretty good job in convincing me that this was worth buying, but he was oh so conservative in his praise. This recorder, which first saw the light of day over 30 years ago, is almost flawless. Of course it shows some signs of wear, but very, very few.
I dug through the archives in the upstairs closet and found the only tape that I currently have - a tape that for 37 years has remained in the box. I had no way to play it until yesterday. I was surprised by what I found. Up until it started playing, I remembered it as a radio show from my hometown, with call-ins from friends and family.
A little history here. In February of 1967 I was in Khe Sanh, South Vietnam. Previously I had been on Monkey Mountain near DaNang with a small group of radio relay folks like myself. We had been writing to our local radio stations back home, beseiging them with requests to send us audio tapes of the top 40 shows on their stations. This was our attempt to stay up to date with the popular music of the day.
Somewhere in my stay on the mountain I got a tape from the station back home (Jamestown ND if you have to know) and to this day I can remember hearing it for the first time. The local DJ dedicated his show to me and apparently had let the towns folk know that he was going to do it at a certain time and place. The show was full of calls from my friends and family saying hello and in some cases giving me a real ration of the bad stuff. Kiddingly of course.
So for 37 years I have this tape in the box, tucked away amongst all my kid photos (my kid photos, not my kid's photos) and other old, assorted things that only a true packrat would hang onto. I was giddy and nervous yesterday as I prepared the old "new" tape recorder and the old tape. Preparation and buildup is important. I cleaned up the recorder - it had a fine layer of dust from the packing material and its stay deep in someone's closet.
The voice in my head is telling me to get to the point, so here it is. I put the tape on the machine and pressed all the right buttons. The lights in the meters lit up and the tape started to roll. Gosh there is something beautiful about magnetic tape and reels and motion and meters. I love it. I could see the meters moving but didn't hear anything. Okay, it is coming back to me. Flip the switch to monitor the tape - not the source. Hit the button on the amplifier to set the input from CD to tape. Adjust the output knob (yes, the volume). There it is - actual sound from voices and songs that cold winter's day, Thursday, February 23, 1967. Sounds not heard anywhere since sometime (and someplace) in Vietnam in 1967.
I sat in awe of what I was hearing - waiting impatiently for the sounds to match my memory of the moment that I last listened to this recording. But it wasn't matching up. Listen a little longer I said to myself. This will begin to make sense if I just give it some time. But it didn't. I was listening to a local DJ who wasn't local. And when he read ads for the local car dealer, the names and places were not familiar to me. The call letters for the station were unknown as well.
This was an audio tape from a station in Minneapolis, Minnesota. A place I had been to only twice before in my life - once when I was 12 and the night before I flew to San Diego to enter the USMC. I obviously had someone elses tape, and have had it for the last 37 years.
I know whose tape it is - it belongs to Kevin Engebretson, a comrade who served with me on Monkey Mountain, A big kid, with a big appetite, who came from Minneapolis. This was the guy who convinced me that I should marry my talent for writing with my love for the technical, and become a technical writer. Oh Kevin where are you now - and by the way, do you have my tape, from my local DJ that know only lives in my faded memory?
So I am happy, very happy to have the tape recorder. But I am disappointed that I don't have the tape that I thought I did. Some of the voices on that old tape are no longer with us and it would have been so good to hear them again. Yeah, and shed a few tears I am sure. But I will just have to live with the old memory, un-refreshed by recent events. Life is like that. Sometimes you can't go back but in your mind. That will just have to be good enough.
The Teac 4010 is beautiful and it plays flawlessly. I bought a bunch of new old blank tape on ebay. Nine 1200 foot tapes for $25 that should be coming in the next few days. I will be busy recording things for posterity. A little bit old fashioned nowadays but I am so excited I can't stand it. Vintage audio - it even feels good to say it. All my watches are analog and I am proud of it. Oh yeah they are Seiko and I never have to wind them, and they don't lose any time day after day and week after week. So not everything is vintage - just me and some of my stuff.
Well, I am going out to the garage now to run my hands over the fender and tailights of my "vintage" 56 Chevrolet. Have a wonderful Easter out there. This is the RiverDogs on the South San Gabriel signing out for now.
6:12:49 AM 
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