I Was A Teen-Aged Hi-Fi Nut, Part One
John Pearsall

Dateline: The Mid-Fifties

Affable Ike and "five o’clock shadow" Dick presided over the booming post-WW II expansion and the hills were alive with the sound of money. Newly-invented and redesigned consumer products replaced everything we couldn’t buy during the war. Using bonus points from my Spokane Daily Chronicle route, I got my first serious camera, a folding 6x6 German Agfa with a great lens and shutter. with paper route earning, my next investment was a Rollfast™ spring-fork suspended, balloon-tired beauty with tank, lights and horn. It was bright green with chrome fenders and whitewalls. Unfortunately, it was gawd-awful heavy and about wore me out. My Dad had a car dealership starting in 1947 and correctly guessed that his Kaiser / Fraser franchise didn’t stand a chance against the Chrysler/Ford/GM powerhouse, so he sold off the cars and parts inventory by early ‘53 and split with the profits. America was changing fast. Industry continued on a roll that didn’t slow down until the 70s. Newly-minted college grads by the hundreds filled the ranks of American industry thanks to the WW II and Korean war G.I. Bill. People were buying houses in the suburbs, making babies, adding bedrooms, listening to Johnny Mathis records, making more babies and adding more bedrooms. You’ve all heard of the "baby Boom", haven’t you? Some of my best friends today were the result of a little vodka, Johnny Mathis on the radio and the back seat of Dad’s Buick. All was right with the world, no money down and 24 easy payments, Marilyn Monroe’s bazooms were widely admired and GM crowed when the ‘55 Chevy became a V8. Singer Dinah Shore exorted us to "See the U.S.A. in your Chevrolet.... Then "Mhua!" She blew the nation a big kiss at the end of every show. In 1956, Elvis left Mississippi and moved to Memphis. Sun Records discovered him and lost him. RCA got him. Stone-faced Ed Sullivan decided to look at this kid with the swiveling hips and defiant pout. Always a savvy judge of talent, Ed launched Elvis on his Sunday night CBS variety show, but instructed CBS cameramen to show Elvis from the waist up. Educators, mayors, congressmen, preachers, parents and defenders of decency everywhere were afraid Elvis’ gyrations would lead impressionable girls to hike up their "poodle skirts" and discover their "erroneous zones". Col. Parker lit a fresh cigar and handed Elvis a new contract that took 50 cents from every dollar he earned. The colonel bought a very large house and smiled. Pat Boone was an anomaly of rock and roll as he chugged after Elvis with his fresh-scrubbed Clearasil™ image. My friends and I shook our heads at the spectacle of Pat attempting to cover Little Richard’s, Fats Domino’s and Jerry Lee Lewis’ greatest hits wearing white bucks, white trousers, a white belt, pastel sweaters and a preppy haircut. "Tooty Fruity, ah rooty, etc." How very odd.

"Tailgunner" Joe McCarthy said the Russians were trying to mold us into "Godless Communists" and that it was my sacred duty as a loyal American to denounce anybody who was hostile toward his world view. Senator Joe further warned us that Hollywood was inhabited by "pinkos and perverts". "In my pocket I have a list of names. . . . ." , quoth the senator. Civil defense drills were stranger than fiction and, incredibly, included an exercise in futility called "Duck and Cover". In practice it resembled the Marx Brothers routine in the crowded stateroom and I chuckle when I remember trying to stuff my gangly 6’1" frame under a steel desk. I never quite made it. Backyard fallout shelters began showing up as the townspeople began looking skyward to see if any Soviet bombers had slipped through and wondering how to turn away the people next door. Speaking of having drills, my typing class was a success and I managed a respectable 55 words a minute on a manual Smith Corona. That surprised the knickers off Miss Simpson the typing teacher, and she tested me twice. That semester we heard rumors about a fast new machine from IBM that used an electrical motor, light-touch keys and allowed blinding speed from a skilled typist.

I whiled away my precious leisure hours reading science fiction and looking for forbidden body parts in National Geographic™. (Body parts were permitted in 1955 if they were from a dark race and photographed in their native setting. Then it was anthropology.) I began receiving High Fidelity Magazine from Great Barrington, Mass. R.D. Darrel and G. Gordon Holt began informing me about a new hobby field called Hi-Fi. A major thrill at least two nights a week was watching live 90 minute TV studio dramas on Playhouse 90, G.E. Theater and others. Live drama felt urgent, wired, real seat of the pants stuff and brilliant theater. There was still a Dumont Network. But no ABC as yet. In TV syndication, Broderick Crawford grunted his way through predictable half hour episodes of "Highway Patrol" while the aquatic Lloyd Bridges gurgled and flippered to the rescue through several dozen unlikely adventures in "Sea Hunt". Milton Berle was the nation’s clown prince/drag princess for Texaco while Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca presided over "Your Show of Shows". Jackie Gleason made me smile with his gentler sketch comedy, but I hated the "Honeymooners". Ernie Kovacs had me in stitches with his inspired madness. (Who’d have thought three men in gorilla suits playing lounge music or a lisping poet with thick glasses, reading his latest ode while sipping a Martini could be so funny?) At least twice, I watched "I Love Lucy" and found that I didn’t. Gale Storm made me want to throw up on "My Little Margie". Eve Arden was so completely cool, sardonic and love starved as "Our Miss Brooks". Every Sunday afternoon, CBS television expanded my world with their coverage of the performing and visual arts. "Omnibus", a distant relative of the current CBS program called "Sunday Morning", gave 1955 America a cultivated view of current musical, visual and dramatic arts, hosted by America’s favorite Englishman, Alistair Cook. Edward R. Murrow was our nagging social conscience with his CBS documentaries on the downtrodden. Perry Mason didn’t happen until ‘57 and "The Beaver" was still a concept. This was a "Golden Age" of television. It still had the ability to surprise us, to unite us and to inform and delight the spirit.

Technology came on strong in the fifties. I saw my first NBC Special in Living Color. Mr. Farley at the furniture store brought in an RCA color console and held a public showing of Mary Martin’s production of "Peter Pan". The picture looked mostly orange and green and gaudy on the round 15" picture tube. The actors looked like hookers or refugees from a Wes Craven movie, their makeup melting under the blazing studio lights. The problem was the original color vidicon tubes. NBC’s first color cameras had the lowest light sensitivity imaginable and bad color balance as well. The bright lights and the strange makeup colors tended to even things out a bit, but it was still strange. If you could afford one of these RCA beasties (nearly $1500 in 1955 — about the same a plain Chevy), you could heat your living room in the winter with their four dozen vacuum tubes. Through my bedazzled technology hungry eyes, however, Peter Pan was thrilling and, by God, it was in color. Living Color! NBC and the Peacock said so. Ampex began hinting that a commercial video tape machine was on the way. 1955 television worked by direct transmission, filmed programs or kinescope copies (a 16mm filmed CRT process for live events). Microwave relays and overland cable were in use, but no satellites, of course. The space race hadn’t begun. Sputnik was still on the ground.

By the mid-fifties, 78 RPM records were almost gone and the little 45 RPM record was the only affordable teenage music medium. (79 cents and sold everywhere) Little brown and gold-colored bakelite cabinet RCA 45 RPM record players with the fat stacking spindle were relatively cheap and reliable. Needing a new needle once in a while and an occasional tube, you were back in business. RCA almost made the mistake of producing only 45’s for everything and skipping the LP. The LP, introduced in 1948 by Ben Bauer at Columbia Records, was not yet really important to any but the committed classical or jazz buyer and, frankly, the turntables of the time were terrible. If the LP turntable didn’t drive you nuts with speed problems and mechanical noise, then surely the arm and cartridge were chewing hell out of the record groove. Mostly from modified 78 RPM designs, turntables still had a long way to go.

As the fifties progressed, I found myself in the throes of adolescence and hormones began jamming my radar. I became vaguely distracted, moody, clumsy and the zits appeared like dandelions in the spring. My voice became unreliable and I didn’t dare laugh or shout in public. My limbs became too long for my reach and I didn’t like my new body except that it was a lot slimmer. Mom had problems of her own. She developed a major letch for a new ‘55 Chrysler 300 in Arctic White with white leather seats and a BIG hemi-head V-8 under the hood and power everything. But, since she already had a low mileage ‘53 New Yorker convertible, Dad said "No, I don’t think so — " and mom valiantly suppressed her Varoom, varoom! tendencies with a resigned sigh. And 1955 was the last year on my paper route. Taking with me a great set of bicycle legs and a tidy sum in the bank it became clear I could make more money in less time mowing lawns. Also, since we only mowed lawns during mild weather, I would not be trudging through snow banks on my appointed rounds. Dad donated his old two-cycle mower with the bent crank shaft, a victim of hitting a horse shoe stake in the tall grass. It buzzed, rattled and shook and threatened to disintegrate, but the money kept coming and the grass kept growing.

Speaking of grass cutting, there were special 1955 vintage haircuts. The absolute coolest hair was called a "Princeton". It consisted of well- greased combed back sides forming the critical D.A. (duck ass) at the back and a perfectly flat crew-cut top (as in aircraft carrier). It was a high maintenance haircut that required copius quantities of butch wax and ten day intervals at Mr. Flack’s barber shop just to keep it vertical. On clothes washing day, mom became resigned to the Exxon Valdez deposits on my pillow cases. We struck a deal. She made me sleep with an old bath towel on my pillow. I kept the haircut.

October 1955 signalled my 16th birthday. Mom shuddered . Dad blanched at the mere mention of the event and was not sleeping well. I took my driving test and passed it with style, despite throwing the examining officer off the seat and partially under the dashboard of the ‘52 GMC pickup. We were nearly finished when Officer Spinning told me to make a panic stop and I executed the order before he had the words out of his mouth. As he got some color back in his face and approved my test, we drove back to the court house where I proudly placed the official card in my wallet. I was now officially entitled to endanger life and limb in an automobile. Life was good.

A week later the dreaded day arrived. On a cool October Saturday, with $125 from my savings account, I boarded a bus for the big city, in this case, Spokane. My declared intention was to search auto row on Spokane’s North Division Street until I found the car of my dreams. I figured that $125 would buy a well-used 1948 Ford or Plymouth or a limping Hudson with a few miles left in it. My search began at 9:30 on the dot. Everybody knows that selecting one’s first car is a very personal thing and requires much care. If the engine starts in less than a minute of cranking and the clutch works and the brakes, too, a sixteen year old is in love with his find. So after much tire kicking and six car lots later, it was already afternoon and approaching 3:00 pm. Something told me that my dream car wasn’t going to materialize for $125 or even $250. A little despondant and forced to scrub the mission, what would I do? Execute Plan B, of course.

I remembered my friend, Mr. French. He had played his home-constructed Hi-Fi system for me and I was very impressed. Gary was really a neat old guy of about 40 and he knew about all this Hi-Fi stuff. His wife didn’t seem to mind his hobby and kept the kids quiet when we were in the living room listening to music. He’d mentioned this great store in Spokane where he bought most of his system, so I decided to have a look. The store was called 20th Century Sales Ltd. and they stocked most of the good audio stuff like McIntosh™, Ampex™, JBL™, University™, Garrard™, Rek-O-Kut™, G.E.™, Bell™, Bozak™and Fairchild™. An elegant saleswoman greeted me at the door and introduced herself as Liz. She was patient, charming and about 35. Her selling technique was classy and cultured and she carefully pronounced Garrard with an affected hard G. Her presentation was skillful and she was patient with my dumb questions. I thought I needed a sound system of my own, so I decided to start with the biggest item first. In about 90 minutes, I left her store with a University™12" coax speaker in a factory sealed carton, a booklet of University™ cabinet plans and a song in my heart. I had boldly stepped into the unknown and become an acolyte. Even more amazingly, I still had $85 in my pocket and by making the speaker box my elective project for woodshop, I could create my Hi-Fi speaker and receive a grade for it.

I caught the last Greyhound to Newport, holding my precious cargo on my lap. When I walked through the door that night, mom asked me what kind of car I had bought. She noted the box with the University™ logo on it and tried desperately not to smile while she commiserated with me for failing to find the perfect car. She and Dad had wisely let me have my adventure and they were secretly jubilant at the outcome.

Even after 42 years, I remember how my factory sealed University™ coax looked and smelled and felt. The beautiful green enameled frame with contrasting metallic gold trim, the pungent smell of fresh construction adhesives, the ribbed paper cone material, the cork frame gasket. My speaker had a divine new smell lingering around it and it was all mine. I probably took the speaker out of the packing box a dozen times that first day just to look at it. I knew I’d chosen well with the University™ design and I decided to build the larger of two recommended "Horn-loaded, bass-reflex" enclosures. My first audio system was about to be launched.

For at least a decade, mom would relate the tale of my first car buying expedition and its outcome. Each re-telling of the story seemed full of relief that I hadn’t bought that car. Moms worry about sons and cars a lot. Especially sons and girls and cars. And Johnny Mathis on the radio. It still makes me warm and fuzzy to realize that I went to Spokane, an ordinary sixteen year old seeking mere wheels and came back a fledgling "hi-fi bug". (That’s fifties-speak for "Audiophile".)

The speaker enclosure proved an estimable project. I ordered a whole sheet of 3/4" American Black Walnut plywood (About $18.00 as I remember) and some appropriate dark gold-tone Saran™ grill fabric, that waffle looking stuff. After construction and the final hand sanding of the wood, my shop teacher tried to talk me into a high-gloss varnish. With that deeply flame-grained walnut cabinet and having seen the beauty of the oiled finishes on JBL™ cabinets, I told Mr. Guy that I wanted a tung-oil finish. He finally gave in and I got an A on the project.

The speaker was finished and sitting in my bedroom looking gorgeous. Now I needed an amplifier and a turntable. Allied Radio™ in Chicago got the order from their 1955/56 catalog. After endless comparing, (I knew every specification by heart) I chose their 20 watt integrated "Williamson-type" mono amplifier with 5881 output tubes and really good transformers. (Probably OEM division Chicago Standard /Stancor™ transformers.) The amp was a Knight-Kit™, Allied Radio’s house-brand of electronic kits. The magnetic phono pre-amp was built in and the circuit included bass and treble tone-controls and 3 switched inputs. The amplifier’s cost? $31.95 in 1955 dollars. I still had to keep my budget under control, so the turntable was a manually operated British Garrard™ Model-T, a stripped, manual variant of the automatic RC-80. At $32.50 it included a curved bakelite arm with a removable shell, a velour covered platter, three-speeds, auto shut-off and a wood base. For $15.00 more, a G.E. variable-reluctance cartridge and a sapphire stylus. Tracking force, 5 grams. I was in business. Or so I thought.

I sent a money order to Chicago with my order. The gear seemed to take forever making the 1500 mile trip from Chicago to eastern Washington. I think the arrival time was less than three weeks. The railway agent was very nice and genuinely sympathetic in answering my daily inquiry, "Is there a Railway Express package for me today?" He would say, "No, but maybe tomorrow.".

It came! The packages arrived intact, so the next order of business was to get the amplifier assembled. I opened the amplifier kit on my makeshift work table and was confronted with stapled bags of little bitty parts. The chassis was a pleasant industrial blue crackle finish with white lettering and the transformers were chunky potted units in black drawn steel cases. Of course, because of their weight, transformers on tube amp kits always went on last. First came the mechanical assembly. That went pretty fast and I had no major parts left over. Now came the critical part: all those wire leads and the soldering.

With true sixteen year old dedication, I slaved over that amplifier every available moment, in the morning, during lunch hour, after school, evenings while dodging as much homework as possible and weekends. After many hours and with the pine resin smell of soldering hanging in the air, the amplifier was finally finished. I excitedly plugged it in and applied a signal to it. It played! And it hummed! I reviewed my work. It still hummed. But, music was coming out of the speaker. I called my friend Gary and he was very reassuring. That evening, I carried the unit to his house and we spent about an hour finding two cold solder joints and a bad ground. Then we tweeked the hum balance pot. Viola! My amplifier didn’t hum anymore. I was in heaven. We played it on his speaker for over an hour until it was time for me to go home. Gary graciously complimented me on my first assembly effort and I went home glowing with pride. At last I would play my music.

It’s amazing. Even 42 years after the experience, I vividly remember my earliest LPs and the musical discoveries I made in the first few years of my musical journey. What that means, I suppose, is that the learning curve for new music is very rapid in the childhood and teen years. The teen-age mind is wide open and the adventure of new music creates a heady excitement seldom matched in later years. In my case, the earliest music is so well remembered that I can still feel the emotions when I first heard it over forty years ago. It’s as detailed as the memory of first love.

My little town (1100 inhabitants) had a Rexall store called Aker’s Drug Store. They stocked a few LP’s on a Spokane jobber’s rack. I discovered the Columbia mono LP/ N.Y. Philharmonic/ Bruno Walter/ Brahms Symphony No. 1 and Book-of-the-Month-Records sent me a Brahms Violin Concerto (Andre Wolff, soloist) and a Von Karajan/Philharmonia Debussy "La Mer". The Brahms Symphony #1 gave a whole new meaning to magisterial. The Brahms Violin Concerto spoke eloquently to my secret heart. My first contact with "La Mer" had major impact. The shifting tonal centers and Debussy’s masterful orchestration coupled with a turbulence just under the surface made me an instant convert. (I still feel that way.)

As finances permitted, I joined the Columbia Record Club and built my collection as I could afford it. I ordered the Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 6 "Pathetique" with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra. It rolled over me like a truck and I found that by venting built-up teen angst while listening to the last movement of the "Pathetique", you could put things in perspective again.. Somehow you just can’t feel so bad when the final movement of the "Pathetique" staggers across a fevered adolescent brain with visions of utter gloom and resignation and death. All very stabilizing, somehow.

My math teacher and friend, Mr. Taylor, introduced me to the Camilla Wickes/ Stockholm Phil./Capitol FDS mono LP and I knew at once I had discovered the true meaning of life. Sibelius spoke directly to the cool cerebral part of me while provoking bittersweet storms in my very soul. I was transformed. To this very day, I still find the Sibelius concerto ethereally beautiful and tenderly affecting. Not to mention a live volcano underneath it. (I eventually met Miss Wickes at a recital, about which more later.) After the chilly Nordic influence of Sibelius, the langorous, perfumed splendor of de Falla’s "Nights in the Gardens of Spain" entered my life (Casadesus?). I still love its fragrant atmosphere and spanish sensibility. Once again, there was Ormandy, this time forcing me to see every thing through a pastel haze with his steamy recording of Jacques Ibert’s: Ports of Call, a piece that still makes me sweat. Wow! A musical feast for a sixteen year old!

I bought a Dave Brubeck LP on Columbia called "Red, Hot and Blue" with the most gorgeous model of the fifties, Suzy Parker, draped over the grand piano in a sophisticated evening gown. Jazz began to open up my experience a little, but classical music was my true love.

Then there was Mercury™ with their astonishing "Living Presence" recording techniques. It was mainly Mercury’s American music series from the Eastman-Rochester/Howard Hansen series that grabbed my attention. I was soon listening to Colin McPhee, Howard Hansen, Walter Piston, Peter Mennin, John Alden Carpenter, Alan Hovaness, Paul Creston, Charles Tomlinson Griffes and many others and there was never a time when I wasn’t fascinated with American composers. Bob Fine had been doing most of these in three-track stereo on 1/2" tape and George Piros was a mastering whiz getting truly bone-rattling dynamics in the mono era. Ordinary console phonographs completely lost it on Mercury records. Mush, rattle, boom, fart, snort!

(It’s interesting to note that little independent Delos™ Records has taken up the American Music cause since 1988 and has long ago surpassed Mercury’s catalog with the Seattle Symphony and their phenomenal conductor Gerard Schwarz.)

Angel and London records in the fifties were pressed in England and were of the highest quality. But, DGG, EMI, and Philips were largely absent from our shores due to various sloppy distribution and pressing arrangements. RCA Red Seal™was not yet "Living Stereo", but during this period, RCA’s engineers were laying down stereo tracks at their recording sessions and releasing a few of the big sellers on two-track tape. Selling at a lofty price of up to $16.95 in 1955 dollars, very few collecters bought them. And the deck to play them was easily $400 (about $1600 now). It was the only stereo sound to be heard by the consumer and real-time duplicated 7 1/2" two-track RCA or Mercury tapes sounded glorious on a McIntosh, Bozak and Ampex system. I first heard stereo that way in the spring of ‘56 and I remember being totally fascinated with the dimension, detailing and space of the recordings. My first stereo tape experience, indelibly imprinted in my memory, was the Fiedler/Boston Pops/ Offenbach: "Gaite Parisienne". When I heard it, I thought I would faint dead away. Recorded tapes were a major milestone in consumer audio that pre-dated what is now called the LP’s "Golden Age" by three years. They gave us a clue of what was possible and what was coming.

In 1953 with Cinemascope™ widescreen spectacles, movie sound underwent a transformation. The studios searched for ways to use multi-channel sound with their wide-screen processes, attempting to lure the TV generation back into the theaters. Cinerama™, an ambitious three camera/ three projector technology, was restricted to major cities with dedicated theaters. Quite simply, Cinerama had the biggest sound I had ever heard in a movie theater. With six discrete channels using big tube amps and Altec "Voice of the Theater" horn speakers positioned around the audience, the sound was sensational. I went to Cinerama features as much for the incredible sound as the visuals. I remember a feature called "Windjammer" about student sailors on a three-masted schooner. The Boston Pops and Fiedler meet the student ship at the Boston docks and play an outdoor concert at dockside. With the robust sound and the deep wrap-around screen, Cinerama could still thrill an audience in 1997.

I build a Hi-Fi system for the music department at Newport High, I discover Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps, I build my University Classic™ folded horn speaker and move up in the world, the transistor finds its first consumer product, audio witnesses the ascendency of the star audio engineer, the stereo era comes on like gang-busters and demands two of everything, early stereo products are pretty silly or just plain bad, stereo FM is a real possibility, home speakers become much smaller, stereo tape goes four track (Martha Stewart would say: "It’s not a good thing."), the electrostatic speaker finds two major champions, phono cartridges, arms and the turntables begin to grow up a little, and the "Golden Age" of the record industry arrives.

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