Where was it that someone declared that history was “his story,” and that if we heard “her story”, we would get a different point of view.
Where was it that someone declared that history was “his story,” and that if we heard “her story”, we would get a different point of view.
Typically with his story you get distortion, as with the “history of a nation”, wherein the story is told in glowing terms for the nation in question, everyone else was wrong.
Only a few altruists, especially Howard Zinn, wrote true and somewhat shamed histories of what got left out of the grade school version.
But I’m only talking about the history of radio. I was taken back by this morning’s exploration of a blog site where come latelys were trying to puzzle together local area frequencies, call letters, formats and personalities dating as far back as the 1980s. I realized that I could have taken them back earlier than 1959, but in this hemisphere liquid spins clockwise in a drain, or so they say, and I planned to stand still.
There’s every reason why corporations don’t publish their own history, all focus is on the bottom line this quarter and business records get purged after a few years. It would be expensive to have a historian, and such trivia is better left to, say, disgruntled ex-employees and avid listeners.
I’ve been down both roads and began collecting local history as a teenager, which culminated in the late 1970s as a fund raising event when I gathered interviews with owners, engineers and air talent from stations large and small. We won a state broadcaster’s award and the station tried to keep the plaque but somehow I have it. I never put it on display because one award only matters if it’s followed by many more.
It’s easy to get yacking about all the power levels, call letters and egos that swirled down radio trail, but being forgotten can’t be suspended by a dredge operation.
Remember this. Not being remembered isn’t so bad, we’ve got to make way for the newly forgotten.
Eventually …
… For almost all of us, even the people who forgot you (or me or anyone) will also be forgotten, and so on … 😉
I’m often amazed at how
I’m often amazed at how incomplete the history of Old Time Radio is – after all, the golden age of radio lasted until the early to mid 1950s (depending on who you want to believe) and that wasn’t that long ago. But since radio shows were effectively owned by the sponsors, who also had the master transcriptions, and most didn’t care about the shows themselves other than the fact that they cold be used to sell more product, I guess it’s not all that difficult to believe. A great number of OTR shows exist today only because interested individuals fished those transcriptions out of trash cans.
It would be nice to think that in this day and age, with the Internet and everything associated with it, that you’ll never have to reconstruct history again. Sometimes I worry, though, about all these bits and bytes collapsing under their own weight, being gems lost in a sea of mediocrity of facebook posts, tweets and other social networking noise.
Crumbling Away
Artisan Radio told it exactly right. Those transcriptions only existed to be played over the air then pitched. It’s astounding how sturdy many of the discs still are, except for “glass” transcriptions, made during the war years, which have literally crumbled into powder.
Tape was such a huge improvement over cutting discs, except that much tape has already crumbled beyond use, as the glues and oxide that bind it together lose their quality. I have a tape that I’m trying to digitize from the 1970s, but it paints the heads black with gooey residue and the sound drops away to a muffle.
I have thousands of radio tape recordings, and I am afraid they will never even be checked for salvage-ability. Self appointed historians have asked me for them, but I am not quite ready to turn them over.
Paper lasts an amazingly long time, in the form of books. CDs and DVDs will go bad soon. Or the formats will disappear as with VHS and audio cassettes.
I think we are witnessing a world that will be quite unknown in a short time. But I hope we still have lunch.
Easy Bake Oven…
Carl, I too had some tapes in which the binder broke down and would drag across the guides and heads to the point that it would stall the transport.
I placed the tapes in the oven, set at about 120 degrees for about 45 minutes.
Miraculously, this reset the binder and I was able to run the tape and make a copy.
If the tape is on plastic reels, try to keep them up off the oven rack best as you can. The hot spot in direct contact with the plastic reel will sometimes cause the reel to warp.
There’s plenty of info on the WEB about Baking Tape.
Not Kidding
Before anybody thinks you are joking I can attest that what you’re saying is true.
I had forgotten about that, maybe because I don’t have an oven.
Back during the tape years I saved a few articles on the subject. I need to dig deep and retrieve those.
And I’m sure you mean a conventional oven, as I doubt a microwave would do the job.
Buzzzzzit…Crackle…SMOKE-
Yes, yes a conventional oven. Microwave-bad.
Some articles mention using convection ovens, dehydrators and the like.
I just popped mine in the main oven in our kitchen.
I thought these were quality tape, made by Ampex and only about 10 years old but the binder broke down and they would not play properly in my Tascam 3340. I first thought the deck had a problem but quickly deduced the tape problem.
Fortunately baking the tape restored the tape and I was able to play/copy them.
Just search “baking tape” and you come up with info about it.