Rinker on Collectibles

RINKER ON COLLECTIBLES — Column #1786

Passive Collectors

I hate being reminded that I have encountered technological revolutions that came and went in my lifetime. I remember life before the mobile phone, personal computer, and television, but they still are around and stronger than ever. Although the pocket calculator’s use has been significantly reduced and it is no longer part of “popular culture,” it survives to some extent within the engineering, mathematical, and scientific communities.

“Born Loser,” a comic strip created by Art Sansom and now drawn by his son Chip Sansom, is in its 56th year of syndication. The three-panel February 20, 2021, daily strip focuses on a conversation between Brutus P. “Thorny” Thornapple, the father, and Wilberforce Thornapple, his son. In the first panel, Wilberforce is holding a mobile phone while sitting on an ottoman located in front of his father who is seated in a covered, ruffle skirted stuffed, upholstered easy chair. Wilberforce informs his father: “I love making playlists of my favorite songs! Did you ever do that Pop?” The second panel is a close up of Brutus’s face. He replies: “Something similar – I made mixtapes of my favorite tunes with my tape recorder.” The third panel is a repeat of the first panel scene. Wilberforce responds with a question: “Cool! But what’s a tape recorder?”

There was a time when I used to think that a “what’s it” question was funny. A person brought a 1920s flour shifter to an Austin, Texas, appraisal clinic. She had no idea what it was. I was in an antiques mall when I saw a daughter hold up a kitchen handheld beater and ask her mother what it was and how was it used. In the past decade, I began receiving more and more “what’s it” questions from “Rinker on Collectibles” readers. In all but a few instances, I did not have to research the answer. I actually used the object growing up or during my younger adult years. It is one thing to grow old and another to realize that entire portions of one’s life have become obsolete.

Dan DeLuca’s syndicated article entitled “Move over, vinyl. Cassette tapes are the new old thing to love” [https://www.inquirer.com/entertainment/music/cassette-tape-revival-philadelphia-music-20210321.html] triggered my looking back at the significant role magnetic tape played in my life. DeLuca linked a revival in interest in cassette tapes with that of vinyl records, citing the fact that in 2020, “music fans spent more money on LPs than CDs last year for the first time since 1986.” He noted that “the desire to possess an analog recording that you can hold in your hands…is now about cassette tapes, which are making a comeback.”

[Author’s Aside: The difficulty with LPs and magnetic tapes is that they are useless without a machine on which to play them. My JVC turntable and Marantz Model 22B Stereophonic Receiver sit on a desk extension to my right and my collection of LPS, mostly classical music, occupy the two lower shelves of the bookcase to my right as I write this column at my Altamonte Springs, Florida condo.]

It is odd how one’s mind works. When my magnetic tape memories were triggered, I did not think of the mass-produced, commercial products associated with magnetic tape. Instead, I thought about magnetic tape personal and business memories that impacted me. Many of these one-of-a-kind memories have been lost over time. Others survive but with a strong “what will happen to them when I die” Damocles sword above them.

My earliest magnetic sound memory relates to magnetized wire rather than tape. My family moved into our rowhome at 51 West Depot Street, Hellertown, Pennsylvania, in October 1948. My mother’s sister Loretta, her husband Bill Rupert, and their family lived two doors up at 47 West Depot Street. Uncle Bill loved gadgets. Shortly after we moved into our new home, Uncle Bill acquired a Webcor (Webster Chicago Corporation) wire tape recorder. Webster acquired the rights to produce wire recorders from the Armour Research Foundation in 1945. After simplifying the design, they marketed a wire tape recorder that retailed at $150.00, a hefty price for the late 1940s. Almost everyone in the family (I had 28 aunts and uncles and 29 first cousins) visited Uncle Bill to record their voices and listen as Uncle Bill played them back. Uncle Bill’s recordings have disappeared. Probably rather quickly because Webster released its first magnetic tape recorder in 1952 and Uncle Bill was not one to let new technology pass him by.

The wire tape recorder era lasted less than 10 years. When I served as the executive director of the York County [PA] History Society, individuals were offering to donate family wire recordings. We scrambled to find a machine to play them. We listened to a few but did not transcribe them. If they survived, they are most likely shelved in a remote corner of the basement.

When I bought my first home in 1966, one of the first pieces of furniture in which I invested (given the cost it truly was an investment) was a home entertainment system. The unit I purchased had a television and stereo radio and record player. The model that included the reel to reel tape recorder was too expensive.

In the mid-1960s, Phillips introduced a battery-operated compact cassette recorder, originally used for recording speech. The portable cassette tape recorder allowed the general public to become involved in preserving “Oral History,” a task previously the provenance of academic historians and folklorists.

The 8-track player also was launched about the same time. I never owned an 8-track player, albeit I have memories of seeing others with one and, of course, being a passenger in cars that had 8-track players.

In 1966, I became the founding president of the Pennsylvania Canal Society. About the same time, I bought my first battery-operated compact cassette recorder. Assisted by Bill Yoder, we started to record the last surviving boatmen of the mule-driven canal boat era. Bill transcribed the tapes and used many of the stories in his book on the Delaware Canal that I published through my Canal Press publishing company, but this is a story for another time. The tapes and transcriptions became part of the Pennsylvania Canal Society library and hopefully are stored and still available at the Canal Archives that are part of the Hugh Moore Park in Easton, Pennsylvania.

Edward Meyers, a 1959 Hellertown High School classmate who recently passed away, was an officer in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps. While in Vietnam, he sent me a cassette recording of his experiences there. I still have the tape but have not seen it for years. It is on my “list of things to find” when I return to Michigan for the summer.

In the mid-1980s after founding Rinker Enterprises, I switched from my portable cassette tape recorder to a small pocket Dictaphone recorder. I used this to record my interviews with Grace Bradley Boyd, the widow of Bill Boyd known to most individuals as Hopalong Cassidy, my favorite movie and television cowboy hero. I had the tapes transcribed by an employee, part of my research for my book “Hopalong Cassidy: King of the Cowboy Merchandisers.” Over the past decade, I have searched multiple times for the miniature tapes but failed to find them. I know I have them somewhere, a phrase that has come to haunt me a great deal as I get older.

During my career in the antiques and collectibles field, I did numerous radio and television guest appearances. When the interviews were live, I usually received a cassette or VHS tape of my appearance. My favorite cassette tape is the radio show I did in New York with Steve Allen. Two of my favorite VHS tapes are of my appearances with Oprah Winfrey when she was a local news anchor on a Baltimore television station, long before “Oprah.”

In addition to my personal appearance radio and television tapes, I have VHS tapes of the 78 episodes and two-hour long specials that I did as HGTV’s Collector Inspector. I know where these items are located. The difficulty is that I no longer own a cassette tape player or VHS player. I considered digitizing the VHS tapes until I found out the cost.

One of my 2021 New Year’s resolutions was to find a library (university, museum, or otherwise) that had an interest in preserving my antiques and collectibles archives -- hard copies, digital disks, and tapes. Thus far, I am procrastinating. The memories still are too personal to give up.

Harry L. Rinker welcomes questions from readers about collectibles, those mass-produced items from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Selected letters will be answered in this column. Harry cannot provide personal answers. Photos and other material submitted cannot be returned. Send your questions to: Rinker on Collectibles, 5955 Mill Point Court SE, Kentwood, MI 49512. You also can e-mail your questions to harrylrinker@aol.com. Only e-mails containing a full name and mailing address will be considered.

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