Redartz: Greetings and salutations! And before you say anything, I know it's not quite Halloween yet and here we are referencing Christmas. Well, if you remember back to our collective youth, the yearly tradition of Catalog browsing started about this time each year. At our house, late October meant watching the mail for the arrival of those huge volumes of toyland dreams. Montgomery Wards, Sears, J.C. Penneys; all three were regular residents of our coffee table for the last three months of the year.
My brother, sister and I would spend hours trading off one catalog for another, poring over pages of books, toys, games, race cars, record players, and just about everything else. The Christmas catalogs were a perfect means to put together that list for Santa, or later on, that want list for parents and relatives. Actually, the ritual of catalog browsing became a greatly-anticipated part of the whole holiday scenario.
And aside from the obvious attraction of the toys, sometimes the catalogs offered other enticements. I still fondly remember a couple of years when the Sears catalog was full of Dennis the Menace cartoons; making the Christmas dreaming even more fun...
For those interested, here's a great website for looking over those vintage catalogs. Many years represented, and you can leaf from page to page just like we used to...
http://www.wishbookweb.com/the-catalogs/
And now, here's some images to prime your memories. Enjoy, and then we can compare our 'want lists'...
Redartz: For most of us, our love for music probably started pretty early in life. We heard songs on the radio, music performances on tv, possibly even had parents who took us to concerts. Many of us (myself included) even had a little record player as kids, generally stocked with some 45's and childrens' records. Our little player, with it's massive tonearm, often could be heard playing Disney and Flintstones music from our bedroom. My siblings and I loved it.
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| Not my Wards unit, but similar... |
However, by the time my teen years had rolled around, that little phonograph seemed lacking. Playing music was getting to be a serious pastime, and required some upgraded hi fi (high fidelity) equipment. For me, this came at Christmas, when my parents gave me my first real stereo. From Montgomery Wards,it had AM/FM stereo radio and a turntable, with separate large speakers. And, it also had a set of headphones (indispensible for listening at night, or to drown out my brother's music). I was ecstatic, and played that unit for hours on end.
Later on at college, I'd upgraded further with the likes of Pioneer, Sansui and Phillips components, but that first stereo holds a lot of good memories. My first exposure to Casey Kasem and American Top 40 was heard on that set, and my first lp's were spun upon it. Many a late night was spent, lying in the dark, tethered to that stereo,with the headphones. filling my ears with Wings, Alan Parsons, and Heart. That Wards stereo taught me the difference between hearing music and actively listening to music What was your first introduction to the wonderful world of audio?
