The Christmas List - Motorola Record Changer

Hipster culture has helped foment the resurrection of the vinyl recording. My youth started out with albums, with their artwork and detailed liner notes encouraging me to buy a lot of really crappy music. My first album was The Village People, a Christmas present from my grandmother. Soon after I got a second hand portable RCA player and started exploring the stacks of records my mother had brought home when she worked as a clerk at G. C. Murphy's in downtown Indianapolis. Long before my disco disk Christmas, Americans were eating up recordings of every sort and players and albums became a staple on holiday wish-lists.

In 1939 when this ad for a little, portable Motorola with the advanced feature of an automatic record changer. My parents had a console RCA unit equipped with a similar changer. It consisted of an L-shaped arm that held disks in place until the right moment when the play arm would retract and the next record would fall onto the turntable. Not bad for 50's tech.

A part of me misses the vinyl era, but not enough to want to go back. I've got no room for the stacks of disks, no desire to pay a premium for music, and no patience for the often finicky nature of disks and needles. But I still can appreciate the 30's kitsch ad artwork and the somewhat angry looking Santa!