An Apple Core, a Toilet: Misadventures of a 1970s Childhood (4 page)

As the summer wore on and my fears and doubts began to wane, I began thinking my first romance through with greater clarity. I came to the conclusion that I'd overreacted to Laura. I began to conclude that she was quite a catch, quite a nice girl. Soon heading into seventh
 
grade, I began to think that maybe I
was
ready to have such a girl in my life.

Heck, I was starting to miss her.

When school finally started up again, I was eager to see her. I paid more attention to my attire than ever before — I'd polished my shoes to a fine shine and even stopped wetting the bed that summer — and I finally approached her during recess the third day of the new school year.

“How was your summer?” I said, confident she had missed me.

She smiled, but something in her smile had changed — her demeanor had changed.

She wasn't angry with me for neglecting her, as I’d hoped. She didn’t much care one way or the other.

Shortly after she rode her bike down my street, I would learn, she met Timmy Schmidt at a picnic. They hit it off instantly. She was “going” with him all summer.

I smiled, pretending I was happy for her — though, truthfully, I felt as though someone punched me in the gut. 

My first girlfriend had dumped me — and I was one of the last to find out.

And as I stood there trying to conceal the pain that filled my whole being, I had but one consolation:
Thank goodness I’d bought two Big Buddies rather than a single Bubs Daddy.

My first taste of love and heartache only cost me a nickel in the end.

The Stereo Console

No sooner did I set eyes on the old stereo console than I was transported back to another time and place.

It happened on a cold January day a few years back. A real estate agent was showing me an old Cape Cod home — a fixer upper — in a settled section of Pittsburgh.

The home’s olive-green carpets were worn through to the floor. The bathroom tile, cracked and warped, was original to the house — 60 years old or more. The walls throughout the home had yellowed from years of cigarette smoke.

The agent explained that an old couple had lived there. From what he could piece together, the husband had passed a decade earlier; his wife had passed a few months before the two of us toured their house.

I felt guilty walking through the house — as though we were peering into the private lives of two people who, surely, would not want strangers sorting through their personal belongings.

Some of their effects — books, old family photos, outdated chairs with stained fabric — remained undisturbed; they were still sitting where they'd likely sat for years.

But many other items had been removed. Impressions on the rugs showed where furniture had sat; hooks on the walls showed where paintings had hung. It was as though the house had been looted by bargain hunters who carted off the more valuable items to be resold at the nearest flea market.

I wondered where the old couple's family members were. No one had carefully sorted and packed the family heirlooms, handing them off to other family members who would cherish them.

The agent told me the old couple had no children — there were no known heirs. The estate was being managed by a lawyer — eager to close the estate and collect his fees, no doubt. Someone had begun tearing out china shelves the old couple had installed to separate the dining room and the kitchen, which saddened me.

I walked into a back bedroom on the first floor, and that is when I saw it.

Sitting against the wall was a vintage 1960s stereo console — a magnificent oak cabinet in pristine condition. It was seven feet long with a slide top that opened to reveal a turntable and AM/FM stereo.

Its large internal speakers, at both ends of the cabinet, were covered with a luxurious gold cloth. The console's owners surely spared no expense when they bought it in the '60s or early '70s. It was a top-of-the-line model.

Bolted to the wall were two sturdy wooden shelves. They held hundreds of 33 1/3 RPM record albums,which, I quickly determined after sorting through them, dated back to the '50's, 60's and '70's: Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis.


Though the covers were worn from repeated use, the records were in pristine condition — not a scratch.

I began to understand why.

Directly across from the console sat two olive-green chairs and ottomans — well worn from many years of use.

As I stood there sorting through the albums, I was reminded of my childhood — I was overcome by memories of the stereo console that my parents bought in the late 1960s; it played in our home every day and night throughout my childhood and for many years after.

I forgot about the agent standing next to me — forgot about the old house I was touring and thinking of buying — as I was transported back to another place and another time when my mother and father’s stereo console filled our home with wonderful music.

***

Like every family in our neighborhood — and most every suburban family across America during that period — my family succumbed to the hi-fi stereo-console bug.

During the '60s, after all, American consumerism was in high gear.

During the Depression and World War II, however — the years when my parents grew up — America had to suppress its longings for niceties. People had little money during the Depression and when people had some money during the war, there was nothing to buy — most everything produced was done so to support the war.

Following the war, pent-up demand made Americans eager to buy nice things. Despite a recession that hit in the late 1950s, they continued to buy, too — until the economy really hit the skids in the mid-1970s.

During the '50s, '60s and '70s, color television sets were making their way into American homes — it was the golden era of TV advertising. Advertisers exploited color TV's ability to entice consumers to buy products of every kind — including high-fidelity stereo consoles.

In one 1970 RCA ad — it is posted on YouTube — a deep male voice describes the beauty of the consoles' hand-polished cabinetry, the computer-crafted design, the diamond needle with its 10-year warranty, the sonar technology to amplify sound with concert-hall precision.

"It produces sound with so much clarity, you can close your eyes and be there," the announcer assured us.

What he didn't say — what he couldn't have known then, with solid state technology still yet to come — is that the glass vacuum tubes of the time required so much space that a large outer shell was needed to contain them. Hence the hand-polished cabinetry.

But that was part of our old stereo console's charm.

Unlike today's highly precise digital stereos, the old consoles were finicky and moody. Even when they worked as designed, they still had quirks. Their tubes took a while to warm up, burned out frequently and were expensive to replace. I joined my father on many trips to Daniel's Discount Hardware store to replace burned-out tubes.

My father laughs now about one incident — though he surely wasn't laughing when it happened in the late '60s. He let me hold a box of tubes he'd pulled out to give him the space he needed to insert a new tube he'd just purchased. I, of course, tripped and sent the fragile bulbs flying about the room, breaking half of them.

Even when it was working perfectly, our old consoles' speakers crackled and popped with static. The diamond needle danced and jumped across scratched records — and ALL our records, mishandled by children for years, were scratched.

The mechanical changer struggled through several automated processes before a record would fall onto the turntable and the needle finally would find its place in the groove — and the rich, textured, scratchy, static-filled "concert-hall" sound would begin to play.

No one in my family — not even my father, whose hard-earned wages paid for our old console — can remember where or when we bought it. It likely came in the mid-1960s from Kelly & Cohen, a privately owned appliance and electronics store where we bought all of our appliances and electronics back then.

Our console was a lower-end model. It was only five feet long, with four spindle legs and a solid oak frame, but it had more cloth than the higher-end seven-foot models. In the mid-'60s a console like ours sold for $150 — approximately $1,100 today — which was a lot of money to single-income families at that time.

Still, our console had the same basic features as the more expensive models — an AM/FM stereo, a four-speed turntable and an automatic changer.

And, boy, was it a tremendous source of joy in our home — especially after Sunday dinner.

***

After dinner most Sundays, the aromas of coffee and pot roast and pineapple upside-down cake lingering in the air, my father loved to play his favorite albums on the console. He loved Barbara Streisand — she was in her late 20s then and her powerful melodies would soon propel her to superstardom.

My father also loved Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass, and we did, too — unaware that Alpert arrived at his "Latin" sound after a visit to Tijuana, where he'd been mesmerized by a mariachi band at a bullfight. With his trumpet, he sought to recreate that energetic music.

But my father would really go nuts when he played "The Stars and Stripes Forever" by John Philip Sousa, leader of a Marine band whose military marches got us hopping.

My father would crank up the volume and march through our small house, lifting his legs and arms high. He'd contort his face in exaggerated expressions, just as Red Skelton did with his Clem Kadiddlehopper character.

We'd jump from our seats at the dinner table and follow him from the dining room, through the living room, down the hallway into the kitchen, then back into the dining room until we laughed so hard tears filled our eyes.

Finally the commotion would reach such a level that he'd stop — so we would, too. We'd plead with him to keep going. He'd tell us dinner was over, that it was time to help our mother clean up.

Much as my father loved our old console stereo, my mother enjoyed it more than any of us. She'd listen to it during the day, while working around the house or having other mothers over for coffee. She'd play it every night after dinner — she loved to whistle along with the tunes, a habit she'd learned from her father and passed down to me.

Hers was a high-pitched whistle — like a happy robin singing on a sunny spring morning — and she could harmonize with most tunes. Sometimes she'd play her Doris Day album and whistle along happily to "Que Sera, Sera."

Mostly, she'd tune the stereo to an AM station that played Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and other popular crooners, and whistle along to "Amore" and "Everybody Loves Somebody" and dozens of other songs I didn't care for at the time — kids never much care for adult music — but love now.

To this day, some of the most comforting sounds I've ever heard — sounds I now hear only after the occasional dinner at my mother's house — were the after-dinner sounds of the dishwasher humming, the stereo playing, my mother whistling along.

But it was during the holiday season that we really put the old stereo console to use.

We couldn't wait until Thanksgiving weekend, when we began playing our stack of Christmas albums.


We always began with Mitch Miller and the Gang, a group of male vocalists who kicked off the holidays with their deep, booming voices. Our favorite album was a 1961 recording, Holiday Sing-Along with Mitch Miller.

It contained the standard holiday songs of the time — everything from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer to Jingle Bells and Silent Night — but our favorite was I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus:

I saw Mommy kissing Santa Claus
Underneath the mistletoe last night.
She didn't see me creep
down the stairs to have a peep;
She thought that I was tucked
up in my bedroom fast asleep.

Then, I saw Mommy tickle Santa Claus
Underneath his beard so snowy white;
Oh, what a laugh it would have been
If Daddy had only seen
Mommy kissing Santa Claus last night

These days, people might get the wrong idea about what Mommy and Santa were up to — and if Santa had tried that with my mother, he wouldn’t have been able to complete his runs if my father had caught him — but children were innocent then and nobody worried about Mommy and Santa ending up on the Jerry Springer show.

Our holiday records included the Chipmunks Christmas, featuring the high-pitched rodents led by lead singer Alvin, as well as Snoopy and the Red Baron, a song about the comic-strip beagle flying his doghouse high into the sky to take on Germany's famous World War I fighter ace.

And as we played these records over and over during the weeks leading up to Christmas, our favorite song was Bing Crosby's White Christmas — which was at its most powerful on Christmas Eve.

There'd be a stack of records on the changer when our parents ushered us upstairs to bed — where anticipation of Christmas morning made sleeping nearly impossible.

I'd hear my parents whispering — my father occasionally cussing as he assembled the gifts we'd think Santa brought — and dream wistfully of the coming morning's bounty