That whole era was weird. Before my old man left, my Brother asked him about how to hook up a turntable that was pulled from our blown Philco t.v./phono combo. Brother "found" a wood crate Zenith tabletop tube amp radio that had no input connections (RCA Phono Plugs and Jacks appeared in the mid 60's, from some kid "who had issues", a couple years after that experiment) and he wanted to connect the turntable to play through the radio. Else, we had no record player. So Pa told him how to do it.
And then Pa left the family car for Brother to take care of the home. A shopworn Chrysler, nothing special. You were allowed a driver's license in Pennsylvania at 16, day permit only. Never mind the ice and snow.
Pa borrowed a late model black Thunderbird convertible with rear deck AstroSound reverb from an unknown relative, to drive to Burbank.
So Brother hooked up the turntable to play records through the radio. But we had No Records! A knock-off album of "The Music Man", a piano collection of religious tunes, a Ferlin Husky 45, and a 45 of his jr. high fight song. He didn't play any of those. The turntable sat there.
Then in February '64, he bought the "Meet the Beatles" with his lunch money. That's when he started using his turntable rig. The ground shielding was poor, and we listened to that album repeatedly through the warm, soft hum and buzz that only a tube system can bring.
What lunch money? We were living in a house on the southwest corner of a dairy farm by the grace of our apparently-wealthy step-grandfather. But we was poor and shitting in an outhouse in the snow. Colder than a witches ass cold. As my Pa prepared to leave, that's when step-grandpa suddenly thought to add an indoor bathroom to that ranchouse. After living there for 1 1/2 years. Suddenly he felt he could do it.
How does the butt ail? My step-grandfather married my widowed Grandma in '57.
He was the main dairyman in the county and a v.i.p. at the local Ford City, Pa Mellon Bank. Every Christmas, each of us kids received a $5 bill enclosed in an attractive Mellon Bank Holiday Gift Envelope. That might be where Brother got his Beatles money from, though I doubt it. Brother was smoking at 16, buying gas for his cruising in the family car and buying stuff. And me, I was 8 in '62. Most of that 1 1/2 years on the farm I spent every day cutting across the pasture to get to step-grandfather's house to play with their piano while being careful to avoid any Bulls in the pasture. I fingered it. I opened the cover and plucked the strings. I even strummed it. Sometimes I would practice as if creating a new tune for Sinatra. Or somebody.
I was creating 1 and 2 and 3 or more tunes each visit. And quite a Lot of that stuff got out.
We had moved to Burbank in '59. That's where Pa bought the t.v./phono combo, though he never played records. At least not at home...
His last job before we returned to Pennsylvania in '62 (started hummin' a song from 1962...yep. A Pun for Penn) was at the Wayne Watson Shell station where I met his friendly competitor. John Marley of Tony's Flying A gas station. Though I've never seen it, the film "Point Blank" is supposed to have shot a scene at Wayne's Shell station. This was the same station that he returned to Burbank "to work for", where he once "pumped gas for a Rolls Royce".
I was a fan of Beanie and Cecil, on NBC in '62, and I proposed a plastic Beanie Cap with a spring-wound motor that would launch the circle propeller blade into the air like Beanie did when you pulled on the chin strap. In practice, a cloth chord. And there was also "Chatty Cathy". Both were mfg by Mattel. We visited a Mattel foreman in Hawthorne, Ca in '65, as "friends of the family". Nothing was said about the stolen toys.
Well, enough of that. But it helps me to remember details long forgotten and never spoken of.
And yes, there is some culture shock. But since I spent Kindergarten in Burbank, I was prepared some. I started my schooling as speech therapy sessions in Pennsylvania at the age of 3. My therapist used a reel-to-reel tape deck and I got to wear cupped headphones in early '57. I became immediately aware of sound and its directions.
Round about late Spring or so, one night Brother was spinning a record on a sewing needle crackerbox player that used an acoustic tonearm to "amp" the sound. No electric amp. The crackerbox broke a year or so later. But as I sat there on the floor with my head in my hands listening, I started thinking about sound direction. I started patting my ears alternately with my hands left-right to spread out the sound. Brother was too smart for the age of 10. He told me that the needle was vibrating on contact with the sound waves cut into the groove of the record. I thought about my two ears and two hands and the left-right walls of the groove, and I asked him about using each wall of the groove for each of two channels, for two ears. By December '57, Audio Fidelity released that version of the stereo record. My old man had already completed his RCA tube repair course by then... ...
My first grade was in Penn for about a month. That is where I got the paddle for failing to wash my hands before touching my own brown paper lunch bag. Then we came to Burbank for about 3 years, then returned to Penn for 1 1/2 years and then returned to Ca to present. The kids in Penn were from rustic country and Ford City, then home of the Pittsburgh Plate Glass (PPG) factory on the Allegheny River. And the kids were honest, sincere, humble, and a blast to know. They were so humble that, there was a kid who wore a stiff formal white shirt to school and he was beside himself.
We were finger painting that day. I took pity on him and I made the mistake of holding up my paint-coated hands and growling like a monster threatening to smear the paint on his nice white shirt. I hoped that he would find the absurdity of the moment and relax. But, I don't know if he was reacting to my cleft palate or to his own much-too-serious shirt austerity. He intead began to scream and then weep, terrified that I would destroy the nice shirt that his parents gave him to wear. I was so sorry for traumatizing him. I backed off and apologized. He just looked at me with tear-stained eyes and said nothing. So sad. There was also a girl on oral report day that was so terrified that, as she stood before her wonderfully nice fellow students, she lost it and wet herself. The teacher took pity and had the puddle removed with haste.
But Burbank. Latch key kids. Broken homes right and left in the majority. Chickens in a box for the sake of "apartment living". And nearly all of them competing for what they lacked. And it was nobody's time for anyone with disabilities. They were/are poor of spirit and it was a chore for them to be nice for no reason other than to avoid being in trouble. If you were given a school team assignment with a fellow student, he would likely shirk the entire time. But I remember getting clever in 5th grade on Valentine's Day. I was disappointed with the west coast kid's lack of imagination and lack of interest. So I cut little doors and windows into a shoe box and glued thank you messages in those windows and doors and puppet strings to open an close those windows and doors when someone dropped a valentine in the slot at the top.
That got oohs and ahhs from the girls while a couple of the boys were fascinated with how I built it. But then nothing came of the interest. I don't think they ever played with creating anything. They just watched t.v. or listened to the radio. Or spun records.
