From the RAT Files Circa 2003: The Hobby of a Lifetime!

The following was originally composed as radio copy for a feature entitled THE RANDOM ACCESS FILE for THIS WEEK IN AMATEUR RADIO for airing on October 25, 2003. For more information on this audio news service, please click on http://www.twiar.org/

I remember this little kid. Cute kid. About nine years old. I remember this little kid sitting in the front room at his house at 644 Morris Street which was actually a huge rambling apartmentthird floor up in the Pine Hills section of Albany. Crouched by the big bay window, tightly gripping a heavy chrome microphone with the big quarter-inch plug jacked into a Roberts upright reel-to reel tape recorder, he sat there belting out a play-by-play commentary over the fly-in, the fly by and the fly away of the glorious Goodyear Blimp , a silver helium-filled, lighter than air baggy cigar gliding gracefully high in the starlit skies over the city on a crisp and chilly Friday October evening with its glittering red, yellow, green and blue pinpoints of light that spelled out the word GOODYEAR in giant sparkling letters across its massive broadside.

Then I remember remember this other little kid. He's about a year older. About ten. He's feverishly tape-recording the warbling, the chortling and the singing noises of the Three Amigos coming out of a big beige-colored RCA Color TV three-inch speaker from a NBC show called "The Wonderful World of Disney". He's doing this with the same grey wrinkly-metal clad tape machine with it's light-glinting plastic seven-inch diameter Scotch Brand magnetic tape reels coasting around and around at an amazing seven-and-one-half inches per second. All the funny music, the silly voices and the bang-clang sound effects preserved on a thin quarter-inch slice of acetate plastic and magnetic stuff that the 3M Company called type 111, all of which is basically just coherent rust.

Of course, all this this happened some forty years ago and all this courtesy of Dad, who faithfully made the commute upstate every Friday night after work because he lived in the Bronx and who sometimes lugged the twenty-five pound Roberts with him just so some little kid could practice blimp announcing or generate an endless succession of mouth-fart noises or sometimes even secretly spied on Mom and Dad's kitchen conversation using the heavy chrome mike with the big quarter-inch plug jacked into the Roberts all weekend-long.

And then there was this other little kid who finally got his own portable Airline tape recorder from Montgomery Ward with the tiny three-inch reels. The big fist-sized microphone was concealed on the front face of the machine which unhinged along with a long thick coily cord, which then could be parked in front of the TV in order to snag the cool Hanna-Barbera sounds from Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear and Top Cat plus neato noises from Hollywood flicks like "Forbidden Planet", "The Day the Earth Stood Still" and "Robinson Crusoe On Mars". All these little kids soon grew up to be me who's talking to you right now.

The Roberts machine would eventually return to me and stay with me and finally die with me many years later but not before a succession of other tape recorders came along, like the monster WEBCOR that I borrowed from Kurt Hackel down the block. It never got returned because he and his family moved away and he said he didn't want it anymore. Then there was the Mercury five- inch reel-to-reel portable and another Wards Airline seven-inch reel job, both of which I played and plowed into the ground until no reels would turn anymore.

But during the associated tenures of all these machines, many more hours would be spent recording silly sounds off the TV or the sometimes seemingly bizarre noises right outside my bedroom window. The Goodyear Blimp would make many more migrations to our city over the course of a half-score of years and on many occasions, the mike would be thrust out the window to document the low "brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr" of the blimp engines. Scary space noises also came in over the crunchy static on a shortwave radio, a big one down at Terry O'brien's house. Terry and his brother Mike had this huge ominous pinewood-finish shortwave radio console with the eerie green tuning eye circa 1940 in their attic bedroom and the WEBCOR was dragged over to archive the weird burbling teletypes, the oodly-doodly howling facsimiles, the impending BEEP..BEEP..BEEP of CHU , the monotonous drone of the WWV and other boinking, beeping and blipping baudot blasts that boodled and oodled their way beyond the heavy cloth speaker and into the microphone.

The many hours spent tape recording soon gave way to many more hours spent hunched over a splicing jig, mounted on my little desk which was hand painted a horrible stark blue color by my well-meaning Mom who felt that wood-aging and antiquing was her personal calling. These hours would be spent carefully slicing and carefully splicing and carefully matching the forty-five degree sliced ends of the tape together with some very sticky milky-white splicing tape, all of which you could get at the Lafayette Electronics store or the Radio Shack. Splicing the tape meant you could connect a bunch of sounds together or maybe shorten or maybe lengthen a song, which seemed a really cool thing to do.

And so this became my hobby. At least it was my indoor hobby. I wasn't a total nerd though. I did actually go outside and do the skateboard and sprain my ankle, many times. And I did go and bat the ball and break the window, many times. And other kid stuff like that too. I did also get into the fine art of throwing stainless-steel razor-edged boomerangs with intent to kill. But here, I digress.

The concept of sound effects as a hobby was further cast in stone when I chanced to see a 50's vintage George Reeves Superman re-run on the tube where some kid running around with a tape machine collecting sounds actually helps Superman catch some big bad thugs by using the recorded sounds of the Man of Steel flying and landing to drive them crazy. I figured if it was good enough for Superman, then it was surely good enough for me. Now of course to our well meaning but terminally-misdirected though-most times kindly Certified Social Workers of our latter day, such an activity would be tagged to as "therapy". Because I was a kid doing all this, the CSWs would pencil it in as "play therapy".

Basket weaving is therapy. Potholders is therapy. Making a lamp out of some chunks of wood is eighth-grade shop class. Drawing pictures of Boogie men is not only play therapy but is also disturbing. Manipulating sounds at your very whim is magic. More than a hobby. Beyond an adventure. Magic! Those hours and hours of taping sounds and splicing sounds did become a minor obsession and this is actually how I got into broadcast radio. At the time, my primary goal was to gain access to sound recording equipment and that I did for about twenty years at various radio stations here in New York and Connecticut.

Access initially came in the form of big glowing rosy red tube-amplified AMPEX 350s and then the solid-state 440s, Scully 280s and Studer REVOX A77s. To be sure, I loved doing radio. But I loved playing with the sounds even more. A universe of monster ten-inch reel-to-reel tape machines, lead-weight sixteen-inch diameter turntables and audio consoles with audio gain knobs, known to the insiders as "pots". These pots were as big as a stevedore's meaty hands, all of which would maintain into the early 1990s when without much fanfare, an IBM 386 with Windows 3.1 and an on-screen virtual production studio-in-a-box called CARD-D materialized. This unseen epiphany unfolded at WROW here in Albany and now things could be done in way not seen before. Play a sound backwards? Click on a tab which said REVERSE. No more physically flipping the tape reels on a full-track tape recorder just to get the same effect. Play a sound at half speed? Click on a tab which said SAMPLING RATE. Change the rate from 44.1 KHz sampling to 22.025 KHz sampling which amazingly equals an analog recording run at half-speed. No more seven-and-a-half or fifteen inches per second mechanical speed switch.

But this was only the beginning. Things began to accelerate and began to become far more accessible beyond the professional broadcast or recording studio. Soon, the expensive IBM clone, the obnoxious proprietary software and hardware, indeed the studio itself was no longer restricted to the pages of Broadcasting Magazine but now sat on the shelves at COMPUSA. Another interesting bit of Karma phased in around the same time. A Canadian company called SOUND IDEAS managed to get its corporate fists wrapped around some remarkable and very well-known sound effects libraries. Here was something I had wished for for many decades and now for a few dollars, well, a lot of dollars, all the sounds I used to tape from the TV, all the sounds from Hanna-Barbera, all the sounds from Warner Brothers, all the sounds from Jay Ward were mine for the purchase. Sadly, the original tapes I had recorded those many years ago are gone. Some were lost through moves from place to another but most of them did not survive the decades well. They simply became unplayable through advanced age despite attempts to carefully preserve them. In their stead though, several small brightly-colored boxes with pictures of cartoons on them and each box loaded with many silver digital disks encoded with the very same things I had lost so long ago. They were back. And what's more, while I still have a functioning Studer Revox A77 sitting on the floor in my bedroom, I have do also nine different computers sitting in the living room loaded with various flavours of COOLEDIT and GOLDWAVE available to me at my very mouse tip. And so that which became my hobby is still my hobby.

In the evening hours when it's just me and Suzie (my one foot wife), I sit before a beige-colored computer monitor with the COOLEDIT displayed upon the glowing screen. There is no tape now. No splicing jig. But there is the mouse which works much better and certainly much safer than the razor blade. And sitting on track 30 of the disk which I just this moment slid into the CD player is a two-minute audio clip of the Goodyear Blimp recorded in 1961 by Audio Fidelity Records as it was nosing it's way up the Hudson River, heading due North and on course for little old Albany, New York. And did you know this COOLEDIT has a multitrack feature?? So there's one track for the blimp, And one track for Bill. And I've also got this long, thin plastic Radio Shack microphone right here with the tiny one-eighth inch plug jacked into the computer. Hmmm, what should I say next? -30-