A Voice from the Past

I am sort of a nostalgic kind of guy. I am the type of person who values items from the past versus trinkets from the present. Over the time I have been blogging, I have written about items such as laser discs, old computers, old cell phones, my old stamp collection plus many other old things from my past which I have found sentimental value in… including old ratty my hat!

A couple of years ago, due to the problem that it was becoming increasingly difficult to locate Super 8 video players, I transferred all my family videos from that format to DVD in order to preserve the memories of my children. Now when I was a young lad (Hey wait a minute! I still AM a young lad!) we never had the technology to video tape us as children. Back then, we didn’t even have cassette recorders as they didn’t even exist. Fortunately, however, my father did possess a reel to reel audio recorder which he used for who knows what. Despite owning this reel to reel recorder, no one ever really thought of taping little kids for posterity sake as it was seen as an unnecessary cost. For some reason, however, my father decided to tape us on one occasion when we were living in the U.K. while we were having my great aunt over for Christmas. I never knew that he taped us on that occasion until many years later when I found his stash of reel to reel tapes while snooping in places where I probably shouldn’t have been. Upon asking him if I could hear it, I heard, for the first time, my voice in the little boy British accent that people used to say I once had.

That was many years ago. Since then, my father had sold his reel to reel recorder and the tapes seemed to disappear along with it. To this day, I never again saw these tapes and as far as I was concerned, the record my little boy voice disappeared forever.

… Until yesterday.

Since the death of my father, I have spent countless hours scouring through his old possessions deciding what to keep and what to throw away. I have basically gone through everything he had owned while all the time kept a close eye out for those tapes I had seen and heard so many years ago. I basically gave up on the idea of ever finding them until, the other day, when it occurred to me that my parents had a small storage place in the basement of their apartment building. Well, needless to say, I came across a small box with three small reel to reel audio tapes in it including the one with the recording of my voice on it.

So… my next goal is to scour eBay to pick up a reel to reel tape player in hopes that these tapes are still functional after all these years. I will keep you posted and maybe post a snippet of that young British voice of mine.