gulofragments

gulos dreamlike bits of memory

Preface

I have lots of stories in my head about times and people and places that are now gone. It has been on my mind for a long time that I needed to make an attempt at collecting and preserving some of these impressions or one day they all would be lost. It may well be that this document, along with my dozens of journals and collections of poetry and photographs, will be lost and forgotten anyway. I have no fantasy that this or any of the other material is art. I guess it is more a virtual time capsule of some sort. Going to all this effort seems to me a somewhat egocentric thing to do. I don’t want to be viewed as being self absorbed. Yet I sorely  wish something like this had been done by my father or mother or grandfather or his grandfather.  As I put them down, these fragments often take on a dream like aspect. I have found myself asking more than once if these things really happened. And I know I have been accused of having a fertile imagination. But I have herein avoided the temptation of embellishment. I have tried to write a documentary, not an autobiography. I never asked for this job. I just outlasted everyone. I still am the keeper of many dozens of hours of audio tapes of my mother and grandfather and other characters that played prominent rolls in my past and hundreds of their photographs as well. The photos and the tapes are pleasant snapshots in time. I never asked the hard questions, when I had the chance, about what really happened years ago. I should have.

Kenneth Robert Philpot

August 2003

Dedication

For Robbie

 draft 1X

19 Sept 2003

I was apparently born on my mothers 23’d birthday, 12 September 1948. At the time, my mother (Shirley) and father (Robert) were living in a 3’d floor apartment at 911 Bridge street in Centerville MA, across the river from Lowell. A short time later my mother was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and my father and mother separated. The year was maybe 1950. My mother moved back home to live with her mother (Pearl) and father (Louis) in a 4 room apartment over the hardware store in Vinal square in North Chelmsford MA. I stayed with my father and his parents (Berry & Mildred) at an enormous Victorian house at 10 Watchusetts Street on Christian Hill in Centerville. As the story goes, it was necessary because my mother could no longer care for me due to her illness. I was too young to understand whether that was the real reason or even understand what was happening around me. I have no first hand knowledge of any of this / only what I have been told. My grandmother indulged me and doted over me and taught me to read, the result being a spoiled precocious only child. I was apparently the apple of my grandmothers eye. My father and grandfather both worked about 15 miles away in Graniteville MA at C. G. Sargents & Sons. My grandfather worked as a machinist and my father worked in a warehouse. “Sargents” was in the textile machinery business. They were involved in the manufacture of the machines used in the mills along the Merrimac river.

  It was there at the house on Watchusetts street that I have my first shadowy memories. I was perhaps 2 years old. It was an imposing three story structure with a porch and small back yard. The lot was tiny and the houses on this end of Watchusetts Street were spaced closely together. The front only allowed for a narrow strip of grass between the front steps and the sidewalk. On the left side was a screened porch and driveway with lilac bushes between our yard and the house next door. In the back yard was a terraced garden with orange day lilies. The house was near the summit of Christian Hill so the lot sloped down to the back yard. At the far end of the back yard was a tall wire fence which divided our lot from the back yard of the house below us. There was a steep drop at the fence and I would often look down through the fence and see kids playing in the next yard far below. I never knew them. Inside the house was ornately appointed with lots of carvings and woodwork. I remember it as being dark. It was laid out in a rectangular pattern. One could move forward and around from room to room through doors and end up where you began. I have no recollection of a television being there.

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My father had broken his leg roller skating in a competition. I was seated on the floor in the living room and he was seated opposite me in an overstuffed chair with his entire leg in a cast up on a stool. The radio was on. Music was playing and we were engaged in some sort of game with toy trucks. He had to stop because he was getting tired and his leg was hurting.

It was a warm humid summer evening. I was in the living room down stairs and my father was upstairs taking a shower. A recording of “Brazil” performed by Arthur fielder and the Boston pops was on the record player. There was a heavy, black, iron, 3 speed Westinghouse electric fan running to help circulate the oppressive summer air. It began to rain and  there was lightning and thunder. The music suddenly stopped but the fan somehow continued to run. I was told that it must be “on another circuit”.

It was a frosty early morning in the winter.  I was with my father & grandfather and grandmother at breakfast in the kitchen which looked out from the back of the house and had a view of the textile mills across the Merrimac river in Lowell. I could see the orange glint of the sun reflecting in a mill window. I heard a distant mill whistle blow. Someone told me that it was the 7 o’clock whistle and it meant that it was time to begin work.

I was terrified of the basement. It had a steep uneven winding stairway which lead to a dark cavernous dirt floored cellar. On one side was a machine with an arm on a big wheel like that of a steam locomotive which would somehow feed coal from the coal bin into the boiler. On the other side was a area closed off with chicken wire where boxes were stored. I could see some boxes contained toys. I was given to understand that the boxes belonged to the real owners of the house, a doctor and his family. We were only renting the house to live in. I never knew any more about the owner.

There was a tiny room high up at the peak of the house on the third floor with a door to my grandmothers bedroom. It had pink striped wallpaper and was used for storage. The smell was that of moth balls.

My father used to have a record collection in his room on the second floor that he used in his skating routines. I remember 78 RPM records with a yellow & orange label. They survive to this day. I also remember many 45 RPM records many of which also survive.

My bedroom overlooked the back yard from the second floor. I could see the garden with orange flowers from my crib. One morning in the spring I looked out and saw a frosting of snow on the flowers.

My grandmother (Mildred) held my hand tightly as we attempted to cross Bridge Street down the hill from Watchusetts Street at 10’th Avenue. It was a raw damp winter day. There was light snow in the air and the streets were covered with puddles and slush and snow. From my right I saw a large black dump truck approaching with yellow lettering which read “Wilson”. It seemed enormous to me and it had tire chains which made a sharp clattering sound against the wet grimy pavement along with the deafening roar of its diesel engine. I declared to my grandmother something about that being the “worst kind of truck”. We hurried across the street to the other side and continued on into the dampness.

After a hurricane my grandmother and I went out the front door of the big house. The gentle air was tropical and the sky was blue with great billowing white clouds. There were puddles everywhere. It was autumn. 

There was a church with stained glass windows down at the bottom of the hill across Bridge Street. We would walk by it often on the way to the A & P supermarket. I would always beg my grandfather to lift me up so I could look into the church through the colored glass.

One summer day I was walking to the A & P with my father on the far side of Bridge Street. Suddenly we heard sirens and saw fire trucks heading down the block and around the corner. We ran after them and on the next block saw an apartment building on fire. The firemen had their ladders up and were helping people down from the second floor windows. My father said that we could not stay to watch any longer.

It was gray cold and raining outside. I was with my grandfather and father in a room that connected to the front door and a stairway to the second floor. Something was gravely wrong. A doctor had been called to see my grandmother. My father & grandfather were silent.

My grandfather would read to me every night in an old antique rocking chair that made a wonderful creaking sound when it rocked. I would sit in his lap and look at the pictures in the book. My favorite book was about a family of rabbits that were painters. The old grandfather rabbit in the family went away one day and there was a beautiful sunset. It was said that it was the old grandfather rabbit up in heaven painting the sunset.

My grandfather would take me for walks in the evening. We would walk down to the end of Watchusetts Street to a park. Toward the end of the street the sidewalk ended and there were colored flag stones. I liked to step from stone to stone.

We had an Emerson portable phonograph in a brown case. I was allowed to play my favorite records which were Tennessee Waltz, How Much is that Doggie in the Window, The Happy Wanderer, and The Maine Stein Song. The pick up used steel needles that would only last for a few plays before they would no longer work. None of these records survive.

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I do not know for sure how long we lived at the big house on Watchusetts street. I will speculate it was 1952 when we moved out. I have no specific recollection of our moving but our next home was about 5 miles away in the rural town of Chelmsford MA on Clark Road at number 7. This was a small neatly appointed ranch house and again my impression is that we rented. Clark Road was a short dead end unpaved road intersecting Riverneck Road about 1 mi east of Chelmsford center. There were no more than 5 or 6 closely spaced houses on the short street each set on it’s own small grassy lot. Behind our yard was a lovely meadow with a wire fence separating our yard from the wildflowers growing beyond. It was undoubtedly farm land that had reverted to native sedges. Behind the houses on the opposite side of Clark Road from our house was an abandoned apple orchard and beyond that, woods. I clearly recall much detail about the house but strangely I have no memory of my room nor any of the bedrooms. The front door entered the parlor and there was a set of stairs to the second floor which was unfinished space. In one corner of the parlor was a television and on an opposing wall on a table was a Zenith Trans-Oceanic radio. There were also built in book shelves in the parlor. The kitchen was in the back with a side door which led to the driveway to the right of the house.

  On the left side of us lived the Grey family. There were 2 girls, Sharon & Karen were around my age. I do not recall the family on the other side except that there was an older boy, Harold, that lived there. Across the street was another Grey family with one older girl, Judy. I clearly recall having a crush on her even at this young age. At the top of the street were the Clarks after which the street was named. One girl lived there, Nancy, and across the street from the Clarks was the Evans house. Harold Evans was my fathers age and at the time they were both heavily involved in the Masonic order.

    My father still worked at “Sargents” during the day but was a professional figure skater teaching classes and students at night. It was common to have lots of interesting characters from his classes visiting him up from Boston. My grandfather stopped working full time and my grandmother became more frail with a heart condition. We were only on Clark Road for a year or so but toward the end of this time a lady moved in with us. Her name was Lou (DiNucci). She was a friend of my fathers. There was an effort to make an extra room for her by finishing the upstairs. I do not remember if the work was ever completed.

I was in my fathers’ car in the middle of Clark Road. It was hot and there was something wrong with the engine. The hood was up. I waited there for a long time while he tried to fix it with my grandfather.

I was playing in the apple orchard with Sharon & Karen Grey. There were piles of apples lying on the ground and we were throwing them all around. There were also many hornets attracted to the rotting fruit. One of the girls was stung by a hornet and went running home crying. I was terrified that I had done something to cause this and would get in trouble and also went running home for protection. Later I found out it was just an accident and there was no permanent damage done and nobody was mad at me.

Nancy Clark had a birthday party at her house. All the kids on Clark road were invited. We played “pin the tail on the donkey”. There was birthday cake and ice cream. We were allowed to play the amazing player piano in their parlor. I watched and listened as the old perforated paper rolls spooled by the window on the front of the old upright.

I was in the back yard with my grandmother who was hanging out the wash to dry on the clothes line. My dog Hansel was running around the yard. There was a fence of some sort around our back yard to keep Hansel in.  He found a part of the fence that had a hole in it bordering the meadow and started to escape through the fence. Terrified that he would run away, I let out a scream and fell down. Hansel heard me and came running back.

It was a Sunday afternoon in the winter. There was snow on the ground and there was dense fog. My father was home and we were watching a rodeo program on the television. Suddenly the sun came out.

It was the middle of the day. There was a hurricane blowing outside and it was very dark. My father & grandfather came in through the kitchen door dripping wet. They told me to keep away from the windows.

It was late one afternoon in the summer. My dog Hansel was greatly agitated, barking and running back and forth outside around one of the corners of the house. My father determined that there was something in the downspout of the rain gutter. He disconnected it from the roof and out the bottom came a rat. The rat tore across the back yard making a dash for the tall grass but Hansel caught him and killed him by shaking him violently. My father said he was going to take Hansel to the vet to get a shot because he had been bitten by the rat in the fight. 

My grandfather took me to visit with my mother in North Chelmsford. She would always have a little toy of some sort for me. This time she had a small coiled up rubber snake with a bulb attached with a tube. By squeezing the bulb, the snake would uncoil and extend itself. His name was Mortimer. My mother told me not to leave Mortimer around because her mother, with whom she was living, was afraid of snakes.

My grandfather and grandmother and I went into Boston and stayed overnight in a hotel. I do not know why we were there. The name of the hotel was “The Manger” which was directly adjacent to Boston Garden and North Station. I could see a red neon sign out our window way down below. It was summer and very warm. We opened the windows to get some air but found there were no screens and were amazed to find swarms of mosquitoes up that high over the city. My grandfather called the front desk to complain.

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We lived on Clark road for no more than 2 years. I will guess it was 1954. My grandfather bought a new house about a half mile east off Riverneck Road on McFarlin Road. It was also number 7, another neatly appointed ranch house on a small suburban lot. There were woods all behind and around McFarlin Road which ran parallel with route 3 which was the main road from Boston to New Hampshire. Back then Route 3 was a single undivided highway and where Riverneck road crossed there was a traffic light. We were close enough to hear the song of the traffic on the highway at night. There was an old farmhouse and huge barn up at the corner on Riverneck Road. Behind the barn were raspberry bushes and a great oval wetland which seemed to be man made, the purpose of which remains a mystery. In the woods about a half mile was a pig farm. We referred to it as “the pigary”. I spent many happy solitary hours out in the woods exploring and playing games of my own making. Across Riverneck Road were several old farmhouses and an abandoned apple orchard. This whole area had been farmland in the recent past and sadly what little remained was in decline. On the other side of Route 3 were vast wetlands where the old Middlesex Canal had run parallel to the highway on it’s way from Boston to it’s terminus on the Merrimack River in Lowell. Great stretches of the old canal were still in tact but now overgrown and seemingly forgotten.

   Shortly after we moved in, Lou gave birth to a baby girl, my half sister Pam. Within about a year, Lou and Pam moved out to an apartment in Lowell and the following year my grandmother passed away. Nothing was ever explained or discussed. I was never really conscious of what must have been great emotional upheaval associated with what was taking place. After my grandmother died, it was decided that my mother would move back in with us. I would love to know what caused this decision. Perhaps it was for my benefit. I missed my grandmother but was delighted that my mother was going to live with us. My father was always cordial with my mother but they always had separate rooms. They were living separate lives but now living in the same house.

  At 7 McFarlin Road in Chelmsford in the early 60’s in suburbia, every night was like a movie. I was now an adolescent and was expected to be home before my father would roll up the driveway at exactly 4:00 from his day job at “Sargents”. My grandfather ran the house and did the cooking and would have supper “on the table” as soon as my father came through the door. It was usually fried chicken with rice & gravy or steak with rice & gravy, nothing fancy,  just hearty southern cooking.

  My grandfather was a colorful but traditional patriarch. Over his long lifespan he had run away from home at a young age, rode the rails, joined the navy, owned a chain of restaurants which featured pressure cooked fried chicken decades before “The Colonel”,  became very wealthy, lost everything in the depression, became very wealthy again as a salesman for Club Aluminum, got involved with the mob, went to prison, all this before I was born. But by this time he had simply become a highly charismatic old fashioned southern character, devout and generous to a fault, with some mysterious secrets. That is how I saw him anyway.

  My father was an enlightened member of the proletariat without a formal education. He was intent on making sure I did not repeat his mistakes which he readily conceded making and about which he admitted having deep regret. I always suspected being secretly listed among them.

  My mother was publicly Switzerland. Philosophically she was always with my grandfather but she worshiped my father unconditionally. She would drink in my fathers’ every word. Silence was her most eloquent statement. She alone at the table understood that less could really be more. Not until much later did I see the wisdom and wealth of her simple but rich approach to life.

  As soon as he came through the door, my father would head for his room at the opposite end of the house, put an LP on his early component stereo, crank the volume up loud, run through the shower, and take his place at the table. He would take the seat to my left at the head,  my mother, who was confined to a wheel chair, to my right opposite him, and my grandfather opposite me across the table.

  Every night we sat the same exact way. The movie would then begin. My father would proceed to conduct the dinner discussion. Some nights he would entertain us with the latest  news about upcoming figure skating competitions or one of his promising students or simply the daily rink gossip. Some nights he would complain about the useless drudgery of his day job. Some nights he would condemn the evil of “society” whatever that meant. His world view at the time seemed to be influenced by a circle of “intellectuals” that he had fallen in with and that he obviously admired. There were clear “beat” undertones to much of the litany he espoused but I doubt he was conscious of it’s roots. I clearly recall a lecture one dinnertime about the value and importance of “being a nut” which was code for adopting unorthodox social points of view. In the vernacular of my pubescent social circles, a “nut” was a disparaging title. My friends were mystified at my delight at the prospect of being so classified. Some nights he would engage in baiting my grandfather about religion and his “primitive superstitious beliefs” or the merits of “good” music in contrast with my grandfathers old time southern gospel tastes.

  Some nights my father would lecture about the importance of science and mathematics and education in general, but all too often this would turn into a discussion of me and my progress in school / the vital importance of “grades” / the high standards of  collage entrance requirements / the stiff competition I would have getting accepted / the life or death imperative of getting a collage education. My father had not finished high school and blamed my grandfather bitterly for allowing him to quit school.

  The worst, most dreaded dinners were on report card days. I was never academically inclined. To me the classroom was irrelevant. I was always too much of a dreamer in my own world. I was very bright and my father knew it and he was determined to see me “apply myself”. Unless my report card was all A’s & B’s I was in big trouble. Over time I developed a strategy to deflect my fathers wrath. My grandfather was always the foil. I knew if I acted pitiful enough under my fathers relentless pressure my grandfather would take my part. Once that happened the gloves would come off and they would go at it. At no time did any of this actually become physical. My fathers weapons were words. On occasion my grandfathers weapon was iced tea, dousing my father and his dinner. This would cool him off quickly but enrage him even more at the loss of his fried chicken and rice. No matter the subject it was always an ideological train wreck. My father seemed to hold a deep disrespect toward my grandfather but at the same time relied heavily on him to keep the family functional at least on some level. What exactly it could have been that caused my father to have such resentment I can not say. To this day I am puzzled by their relationship.

  But the dinners I most vividly recall are the ones where my father and grandfather would have heated discussions about some mysterious man, a former dark associate of some sort of my grandfathers. The discussion would always begin with my father asking my grandfather if he had spoken with “his man” and if there was “any news”. My grandfather would try to avoid the topic, but my father would not be denied, he was relentless. Soon it would evolve into a full scaled argument using very peculiar shadowy non specific terms and references. I was eventually able to piece together the story. My grandfathers stay in the big house was apparently the result of a mob deal gone bad. It was rumored that someone ran out with a suitcase full of securities and my grandfather ended up taking the fall. After doing his time he contacted “his man” presumably to collect his rightful share of the booty. My father had gotten wind of this and was desperate to quit his day job and build a skating rink where he could follow his passion. He must have seen this as his big chance / his ticket out. At this point the meal and discussion would end abruptly with my father and grandfather adjourning to my fathers room to have a (loud) private closed door conference. Years later after my grandfathers funeral in 1979  I confronted my mother about the story. She was my grandfathers only real confidant. She confirmed the mob connection and the prison term but denied that there was ever any buried suitcase filled with treasure. I asked why my grandfather let the story continue and take on such proportions. She had no answer. But it was always the best show in town.

  My grandfather and my mother were really great companions and complimented each others’ abilities. Being disabled, my mother was unable to walk without help, but could do basic household chores. My grandfather could still drive and do errands and would enjoy going places on Sunday with my mother and I in the car. We would often drive to Edwards Beach on Nabnasset Lake in Westford in the summer. Or sometimes we would drive up to Nashua NH and get take out from Green Ridge Turkey Farm. We would eat fried clams & French fries in the car. My grandfathers’ driving was a real adventure. How we survived I will never know but somehow he avoided a serious wreck.

  By the time I was in high school, my father and mother finally formalized the situation that had been the reality for years by divorcing. In retrospect, my mother was a truly remarkable person in so many ways. Only now have I gained enough perspective to consider what life may have been like for her. Because the onset of her disability happened before my own sentience I somehow never thought of her as ever having been a “normal” woman with aspirations and fears and desires like everyone else. Despite the fact that the multiple sclerosis cruelly snatched away her vitality in her prime, I never once ever heard her complain of the unfairness of her lot in life. This is made all the more remarkable given my fathers lack of support and commitment. It is sad to consider her silent unrequited devotion to him. If anyone had a right to be bitter she did. If my mother had a dark side, I never once saw it.     

  She would fill her days with a Zen like routine of small chores, taking pleasure in the details of what things she was able to accomplish. In spite of being confined to a wheel chair at a time when the technology was not very helpful, she took part in many social activities. She and my grandfather became members of the “5 Watt Whips”, a local CB club (my mother having taken over my old CB radio after I lost interest). They were both immediate personalities. My grandfather had southern charm and generosity. My mother was a sparkling charismatic conversationalist. Her style was simple and non - intellectual. She would love talking all night on my old CB radio to all of her admirers. On the radio she was just Shirley, KBC1696, and had no disability.

  Fortunately for me, she was also very fond of writing as well as conversation. She was always sending letters to friends or relatives. When she was not writing letters or talking on the CB radio until all hours she was busy penning a monthly column in the “5 Watt Whips” newsletter or short stories about a simple time and a idyllic world. All of her short stories and most of her columns survive. I lost her to emphysema in 1983.   

   My father had actually moved out sometime earlier and was living with his (future) second wife Dorothy (Dot) Adams in Abington MA. “Miss Adams”, as I called her, was a teacher and would always send me wonderful books for Christmas. Several of these books survive. As it turned out, I was the first of 3 “only children” my father had. Pam, my half sister, was the second, born on McFarlin road to Lou while my father was separated from my mother (Shirley). Then after divorcing my mother and moving out and marrying Dot Adams, Sean was born. He was the third “only child” of my father.  After Sean was grown and Dot had passed away, my father married Lou and moved to New Mexico. Pam and I were thrilled for them. Sean was unable to accept the situation. He felt entitled to my fathers property in Abington where he had lived and grew up with his mother Dot. This conflict between my father and Sean was strangely similar to the conflict between my father and my grandfather decades earlier. This time I was Switzerland. My father passed away in June of 1999. Lou still lives in New Mexico.

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It was late autumn at dusk. The skies were clear and there was a chill in the air. Standing in my back yard I could see the headlights of the McKennedys’ old Ford farm truck beyond the wetlands through the trees as it bumped along the pigary road on their way home.

In the early 60’s route 495 was built. The new highway intersected route 3 on the other side of Riverneck road from McFarlin road. The intersection consisted of a “clover leaf” and an additional interchange with the new “Lowell Connector” highway. The area was mostly wetlands which would flood to form a small lake every spring. The old Middlesex Canal had run through there and parts were still plainly visible. The great construction machines were fascinating. There were all manor of bulldozers and dump trucks and great earthmovers of every description. But the machines I most vividly recall were the tremendous cranes with their great buckets. They were needed to dredge out the wetlands in order to build the roadway across. I can still hear the sound of the steel cables slapping against the towering boom of the Bycarius-Erie crane as it would swing and cast the bucket far out into the wetland. It is sad to note what destruction of the habitat was being done. But for a young boy, it was magical. I would stay home from school / listening to the sound of the great diesel truck motors in the distance on the other side of route 3. 

It was late in a winter afternoon. I think it was a Sunday and the last day of a school vacation week. There was a very intense winter snowstorm earlier that day. The skies had cleared except for a few very thin wispy clouds that were racing across the sky. Snow showers would fall every time one of these clouds passed by. I was given to understand that the storm was as intense as a hurricane and the periodic snow showers were similar to the “spiral bands” that hurricanes have. I clearly recall standing in the driveway and looking down Mc Farlin road to the south east watching the next cloud approach. What was strange was that the sky was almost clear and yet it would snow very hard but only last for a minute or so. It is my impression that it was 1965.

 I was in the audio department of a store in metro Boston. I am unsure who I was with. I clearly recall seeing a large Grundig radio for sale that was tuned to an FM station playing classical music. This was at a time that I craved a way to listen to classical music but only had a small AM radio. The FM sound was full and crystal clear compared to AM. I was spellbound. It was around 1962 because I connect this image with Beatle music.

It was my father’s interest in audio that was responsible for all my interest in things technical. My first awareness of his earliest component music system was in the early 1950’s. At that time he was limited to 78 and 45 RPM records which he used for teaching his skating students.  I suspect the “record player” he started with was the very same Emerson radio / phonograph that was on Watchusetts St. Some time later the radio and the turntable were for some reason surgically separated and put into separate wooden boxes. I eventually got the radio half. The turntable was used by my father in the early days. In this period he had no way to produce a musical program which was made up of several different musical sources. This was before home recording equipment was widely available. When wire recorders were developed for home use, he was among the first skating pros to assemble his freestyle programs from multiple sources onto magnetic wire. Skating rinks were not equipped with wire playback facilities so he would have to bring his very crude wire recordings to a studio and have them transferred onto an LP for playing in skating rinks. I remember actually going with him one time to a studio in downtown Boston near where the Orpheum is today.  I clearly recall a discussion between my father and the engineer about which speed (78 or 33 RPM) would yield the best sound. The engineer was referring to the physics involved in the cutting head and subsequent phono pickup. For these, faster (78) is always better to avoid mistracking and distortion especially in the inside grooves. My father held the belief that slower (33) was better. This stemmed from the fact that the “new” 33 RPM LPs that were being released around that time sounded so much better than the old 78’s. The new recordings really sounded better because they had the benefit of vast improvements in tape recording mastering and pick up technology, not because of the speed. The slower speed actually added distortion but played much longer. The long play was not much of a consideration for a record which only contained 5 minutes for a skating program. I was captivated watching the grooves being cut into the vinyl blank. Some of these custom cut records survive but at 78 RPM I have no way of listening to them. He also used the old wire recorder to make the first live recordings of him and me speaking. They are very crude. Dubs of this wire recording survive.

  By the late 1950’s real tape recorders were available and my father upgraded to a Webcor tape recorder. This behemoth of a machine was the size of an air conditioner and weighed about the same. It had 3 ¾ & 7 ½ IPS speeds, took 7 inch reels and had a neat tube which glowed like a green eye and showed the recording level by the width of the shadow projected on it’s face. The “eye” would close more as the music got louder. The correct level to set the record volume would be just loud enough to “close” the eye. Finally he could record programs as needed and haul the Webcor to the rink, hook it into the PA system and voila’ out comes his freestyle skating program music. But the music recordings he used in his choreography were magical. The house was always filled with Scheherazade or Bolero or Sleeping Beauty or Swan Lake or amazing orchestral music from Wagnerian epics. I was smitten.

  Sometime in the early 1960’s he upgraded again, this time to a Roberts stereo 4 track tape recorder. This machine was loaded with bells & whistles. It consisted of 2, much more compact units: the main recorder, and an amp / speaker unit for the second channel. This baby could sing. The sound was awesome. About the same time, my father assembled a real stereo component system for playback and to record from. The turntable was a Lafayette transcription with an ESL tone arm and a GE cartridge all mounted on a home made base. The left channel amp was also made by Lafayette and the right channel amp was apparently home made but not by him. The speakers were in corner bass reflex enclosures which were large floor standing units.  The left speaker was a 12” Lafayette SK 58 coaxial design. The right speaker was a 12” GE but lacked the coax tweeter of the Lafayette. The speakers were very efficient so the 20 or so Watts per channel of the old tube amps made an impressive sound. They put you right there in front of the orchestra. Wow. Years later I would eventually inherit most of this gear in one form or another but sadly none of it survives.

  So it was, until the early 1960’s on McFarlin road when I became old enough to really start my engineering career (I was around 12). I was hungry for a way to listen to this amazing music and spent lots of time studying the Lafayette mail order catalogs that would come addressed to my father regularly. I knew all the names and specs of all the latest hi–fi and radio equipment. But on my $0.50 per week allowance I could not even afford an LP let alone fancy audio gear. All I had was the radio half of the old Emerson for a musical source. It would pick up a few local AM stations but none played classical music. So I whined and lobbied and made a general pest of myself until one day my father brought home an ark of an old radio for me to play with. It was apparently removed from a console unit of some variety and only consisted of the radio portion. But what a grand receiver it was. It had a wide slide rule dial with a green tuning “eye” (just like the old Webcor) and it tuned not only the AM broadcast band but several short wave bands as well, but not FM. It was quite sensitive and selective and with it I discovered there were a few AM stations out there that actually played classical or at least orchestral music. None came in very well there in Chelmsford but at least it was a start. There was WEZE in Boston on 1260 kHz. They played light classical orchestral music but at night their signal got buried in a pile of other stations on the same frequency. There was also WCRB in Boston on 1330 kHz with an even noisier signal also receivable only before dark. But after dark, WQXR’s 50,000 Watt signal would start rolling into New England from New York City. WQXR was the beacon of classical music on the AM radio. Some nights they would boom in but other nights they were noisy and would fade in and out badly. So I started to experiment. First I hooked up a big speaker that I got out of an old TV. That made the music sound clearer but also made the noise and distortion clearer too. Next I tried adding an outside antenna. I strung wires up in the trees all over the yard. Better. Much louder signals but still noisy. So I tried adjusting the dozens of tuning slugs in the old set. There must have been a dozen or so tubes and each stage had several things to tweak. I found I could make things a lot worse really fast. Eventually I was able to adjust everything to yield  the maximum sensitivity and even make the dial calibration more accurate. But AM was just inherently noisy and that was the limitation.

  My father began to take notice of my interest in “electronics” as it was called back then and on birthdays and Xmas gave me gifts that would encourage my development. One year I got a “7 in 1” electronics set. This was a kit of components that could be assembled into any one of seven different circuits ranging from a Morse code oscillator to a simple one tube receiver. I devoured this stuff in no time. Soon word got out that I was some sort of an electronics geek in training and people started donating all sorts of old TV’s & radios. Most of this stuff was junk but I would take them apart and salvage the parts for use in other circuits. On the next occasion my father bought me a really nice 9 transistor AM pocket radio. Lafayette FS 91 was the model and it was a real beauty. It had a spiffy gold speaker grill and a real leather case. It was small too and ran on penlight batteries. I could even pick up WQXR at night! I practically wore it out the first few weeks. I would keep it under my pillow and listen at night to stations from all over the country. I really loved that little radio. Sadly it did not survive either. It has become a very collectable radio today.

Finally one Christmas under the tree was a small FM tuner and a small tube amplifier. I connected them up to my big salvaged speaker, turned them on, and out came another world. As I tuned the little Granco tuner across the dial I heard dozens of stations, all of which were playing classical music. I was in heaven. WXHR, WCOP, WBZ, WCRB, WGBH, WBCN, WFCR, they were all coming in so clearly, without static and in glorious high fidelity. Heaven. Heaven. I could actually hear all the different instruments in the orchestra. I added another speaker. Better sound. An FM antenna. More stations. I read everything I could get my hands on about radio and amplifiers and speakers and antennas.

  Next year a Garrard Autoslim record changer and a second amplifier were under the Xmas tree. My little music system was starting to finally become a reality. I would save all my allowance money to buy records. My father’s records were off limits to me (NOW I understand why but at the time I felt it was grossly unfair). I started building my own equipment. I added a microphone preamp and a mixer. Eventually I ended up with the old (now worn out) Webcor tape recorder but by that time it was not usable for music any more. I still had lots of fun with it recording voice and quite a few of these original recording survive and have been dubbed onto cassettes.

  By the time I reached high school, Xmas brought my first serious amplifier. It was an Eico 2050. The only catch was that it was a kit. If I wanted this amazing amp to work it would be up to me to build it. Piece of cake. I had that baby running within a few days. And oh the sound was glorious. It would put out 50 Watts (peak) but what an improvement from my homemade amplifiers. The sound was now much more open and lifelike that it had ever been before. This amplifier not only survives to this day but it is in working order although it is a little banged up. So I started working on building new speakers to handle all this wonderful power. I read books by Henry Kloss and Roy Allison (founders of KLH & Acoustic Research) about acoustics and how the hearing process works and how different speaker designs affected the sound. Plywood. I needed plywood and screws and glue and a saw to build speaker enclosures. At first I had to use cheap surplus drivers but eventually I was able to save up and buy a pair of Electrovoice LT 12s (known amazingly as “Wolverines”). These were 3 way 12” coax drivers. This was the point at which my component audio finally surpassed my fathers system. I was 16 years old. The last Xmas present of my adolescence was the matching Eico 2200 FM stereo tuner to the 2050 amplifier. I can say that to this day I have not owned a better FM tuner although the stereo decoder left something to be desired. It took a near lightning strike and was never the same after the repairs. I no longer have this unit.

  Almost all of this vintage gear is now gone - sold or junked or traded away for other gear. I sometimes regret not preserving it all but it really would not have been practical. But I have my father to thank for supporting my hobby which would eventually grow into a career. Perhaps he understood that following my passion would be a good thing for me.

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