Back during my childhood daze in the mid-1960s, I had a gadget that felt like it came straight from the future: a portable Panasonic reel-to-reel tape recorder. To my young mind, it was the ultimate in cool. It wasn't close to state of the art, but it could capture and playback sound, a feat that I found utterly captivating.
Kids from my suburban St. Louis County neighborhood would drop by, and we'd transform my bedroom into a broadcast booth and do our best to simulate the legendary Cardinal play-by-play announcers at the time, Harry Caray and Jack Buck. With the help of a walkie-talkie's fuzzy static for a cheering crowd-noise generator, we recorded imaginary games from our imaginary broadcast booth.
I’m not sure what ever happened to that little recorder. It probably wound up getting tossed along with my baseball card collection when I left home to attend college. But the memories? Those remain. They’ve lasted far longer than any reel of magnetic tape ever could.
I'm just enough younger than you that I had a GE cassette recorder rather than a reel machine.
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