Your First Phonograph/Stereo

You probably started out with this.......

And moved up to a stock GE kids phonograph of the early '70s (also manufactured for Sears and Concert Hall under their house names...)

.....or if you were really lucky, you got one of these.....

Vanity Fair and Imperial "Party Time" phonographs were really cheap knockoffs. Made of cardboard, low quality parts and a stock design that was easily customizable for whoever wanted to license their images and product name to  it. That's why they were the most popular design of kids phonograph .....

The famous Michael Jackson Vanity Fair phonograph. Still made by VF/Imperial "Party Time" Clean, functioning units however sell for LOTS on eBay.....Way too much in my opinion......

Barbie Phonograph, made by VF/Imperial

Another portable record player w/radio, the Phillips portable. It was also made by Sony. and also sold under the then Phillips owned record label names of Mercury and Fontana. The blue Fontana labeled ones are the rarest.....

The GE Trimline 500: A very popular portable (allegedly), stereo record player of the early-mid '60s. They were popular as teenage hand-me downs from parents in the '70s because they were SUPER rugged and lasted THEM through high school and college. They were also SUPER heavy, but look at it! It was made of 90% pure metal parts! And it was built to LAST. The speakers were fully detachable and housed in steel cabinetry, just like the rest of this thing. And GORGEOUS sounding! With a dependable 40 watt tube amplifier with full bass and treble knobs (yet just a tad brassy, speakers being encased in metal boxes.) The plastic tone arm was a bit on the heavy side, but the automatic mechanisms rarely failed. Repairing one is also pretty easy and pasts are everywhere on eBay.....   

The GE Wildcat was a sleeker, MUCH lighter plastic cased version of the Trimline. While still a durable and dependable record player, the 40 watt tube amplifier of the Trimline had been replaced by a 20 watt transistor amplifier. But the basic mechanisms remained the same.....

The Emerson Swingmate

Fisher-Price's first REAL record player. It was designed as failproof as a kids phonograph could get (and believe me, NOTHING is completely failproof around a smart kid for too long....)

Click here for Part Two

School Lunches

Ahhhh.....The delicious, irresistible public school lunch........

Oh hell, they were horrible.

At elementary schools in the Edmonds School District in the '70s, school lunches consisted of a weekly rotating menu of:

- Some Slop Over Rice or Mashed Potatoes: This wasn't the official name of it on the menus that went home to our parents and I can't remember what they billed it as. This was just what the lunch ladies themselves called it.

The slop itself varied in colour from a pinkish beige to a gelatinous brown substance, both with bits of an unknown meat by-product.

An Edmonds School District lunch lady making slop......

 - Cheese Pizza

- Hot Dog (This was infamously called on the menus - are you ready for this? A "Wiener Wink".)

- Sloppy Joe: Ubiquitous on EVERY school lunch menu in America to this day

- Fish Sticks

-  Burrito

-  Taco

- Spaghetti

And the list went on.

I found a very disturbing web site recently. One that's actually quite shocking, considering we should be feeding our kids (who've committed NO crimes) better than THIS.....

http://cityrag.com/2012/05/prison-food-or-school-food/ 

Edison Disc Records

Check out THIS beauty! An Edison Disc Phonograph from 1912! And it STILL sounds GORGEOUS! Edison's Disc Records were very advanced for their time, using a diamond stylus (instead of a steel needle) and a floating diaphragm, things that wouldn't be seen again until the Hi-Fi age of the early '50s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edison_Disc_Record

Perfection and Superfection

The missing piece here is probably STILL under somebody's couch or bed somewhere.......

Perfection and Superfection were games made by Lakeside in the '70s

Perfection was a game where you put the shaped game pieces into their matching slots on the game board before a one minute timer expires and the board ejects everything. If you can complete it, you can stop the timer. If you couldn't, you were left picking up game pieces everywhere for 10 minutes.

Superfection had a two minute timer and puzzle piece blocks..

Somehow, I could never complete either of them before timer blew everything up.

 

"Mister Hot Rod" The Scramblers (1964)

"Mister Hot Rod" The Scramblers (1964)

Like most of the budget record labels of the '60s, Wyncote produced a lot of cheesy low budget knockoff material. They were the budget subsidiary of the Cameo-Parkway label, one of the larger independents of the '60s.

This album is mostly your average Beach Boys/Jan & Dean knockoff - except for this strange offering. This track, which also appears on the Incredibly Strange Music, Vol. 1 CD compilation is by The Scramblers, another anonymous group of session musicians that recorded for a budget label.

(I just can't imagine the crowd going wild over this one. Maybe staring.......)