Journey through a lifetime of stuff

The end of my regular 100-mile round-trip commute last May had an effect I should have anticipated. For the past several years, most of my book reading was on audiobooks, and most of that consumption came during the two hours I spent in the car on the way to and from the office three to five times a week.

I’ve been logging the books I read each year since 1994. I read 31 books in 2025, 26 of them on audio — just half as many books as in 2024 and about a third of my average for the previous five or six years.

“When I retire, I’ll have time to read all of the books I’ve accumulated over the years.” Actually, most of the reading I’ve done has been articles that turn up during my scrolling on social media.

“When I retire, I’ll watch the movies and TV shows I’ve collected on DVD and Blu-Ray.” Nope — streaming services.

“When I retire, I’ll organize my ridiculous record collection and listen to an album or two every day on the turntable or CD deck.” Nope — Apple Music.

It’s all so damn convenient — except it isn’t, not really. I’ve just trained myself to settle for whatever turns up in the web surf instead of anything intentional or deliberate.

I could entertain myself for years with the books I’ve amassed, or by turning on the TV only to use the Blu-Ray/DVD player, or by sitting in front of the turntable and listening to my music collection.

It’s kind of nuts. I made these purchases along the way so I could revisit them at my old-age leisure, and here I am in my old age, letting them collect dust while I check out what’s new on Netflix.

I could save a ton of money by weaning myself from the streams and spending my nights with my stuff. The first week I could:

• Sunday: Watch Lawrence of Arabia;

• Monday: Listen to episodes of The Shadow, Gangbusters, X Minus One and the Jean Shepherd show;

• Tuesday: Listen to Rubber Soul, Kongos, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, and Bamboo, a band that played at Ripon College more than 50 years ago and whose record I still have not removed from the cover;

• Wednesday: Read a play by Shakespeare or Ionesco;

• Thursday: Finally watch Solarus, the Russian science-fiction movie that my late friend Wally Conger said is awesome but I still haven’t checked out years after buying the Blu-Ray;

• Friday: Watch two or three of the “50 Great Drive-In Movies” that I bought for 10 bucks back in the day;

• Saturday: Have a Godzilla marathon night with two or three of the 21 movies I own featuring the biggest monster of them all.

And after that first week, I’ve barely scratched the surface of the surface.

It sounds like a great plan, but I’m nearing the end of Season 2 of Homeland on Netflix, and I’m anxious to see what happens next. I think I might be more insane than Carrie Mathison.

The sounds of 78

For about 10 minutes in 2016 — well, actually, 13 weeks — I produced a podcast called 78 Revolutions Per Minute, in which I shared stuff from my rather prodigious collection of 78 rpm records.

I have somehow accumulated hundreds, perhaps more than a thousand, of these 10-inch bygone relics. This year marks the 100th anniversary of the invention of the electric microphone, which replaced the previous technology of singing and playing into a megaphone-like horn attached to a recording stylus which vibrated the sound directly onto a wax disc, which was then reproduced onto the brittle shellac records that had to be handled with extreme care.

My collection includes quite a few of those pre-1925 recordings, and sometimes I’ll listen to Harry Lauder or Aileen Stanley and ponder the thought that the sound of their voices is more than a century old.

Hard to believe the podcast was nine (!) years ago already. While I had fun with it, I am still waiting for downloads of 11 of those 13 episodes to hit double digits. I’m sure there’s an audience for 78 rpm music, but it didn’t find my little efforts back then.

One of the reasons I bought my fancy-schmancy Audio Technica turntable is its ability to play 78s, but it’s been awhile since I took advantage of that feature. I whiled away part of my Saturday afternoon doing just that. I hung around the 1950s for the most part — by then the technology had advanced to vinyl records that spun at 45 or 33 revolutions per minute, but companies continued to make 78s until almost 1960.

(In fact, 78s survived even later in some parts of the globe, and I’ve seen references to Beatles songs on 78. My beloved Nitty Gritty Dirt Band even released some promotional copies of “Mr. Bojangles” on 78 in 1970. I may hunt one of those down if I ever win the lottery.)

As my 71-year-old copy of “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley & the Comets boomed out of my Bose speakers, I was again amazed at how good a well-preserved record sounds on the right equipment decades later.

I need to go exploring through my old records more often — it’s why I bought them, after all. Why collect old stuff if you don’t look at it or, in this case, listen to them? Who knows? Maybe the world is even ready for more episodes of 78 Revolutions Per Minute.

Fourteen hundred days, plus one

The number 1400 means a little more than the average four-digit numeral to me, largely because I spent 11 years of my life speaking into microphones that carried my voice into the atmosphere at 1400 kilohertz.

When I was a kid growing up in New Jersey, for many summers in the 1950s and ’60s, we would spend a week or two at a cabin along Lake Champlain in Milton, Vermont. Occasionally we would venture into nearby Burlington for dinner and a stroll around town.

One such stroll took us past the storefront studio of WDOT, a popular radio station at 1400 kHz on the AM dial. I watched, enraptured, as a guy sat at a control panel and played music and commercials. My most vivid memory is that when he announced what time it was, he called it “chime time” and rang a bell — “Chime Time is 8:14, folks [DING!]” and for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out where the bell was.

I trace my fascination with radio to two things — my dad’s enthusiasm for his ham radio operation and WDOT’s storefront studio. They led directly to the 22 years I spent doing radio news in the first half of my post-collegiate career.

A somewhat circuitous route took me to the studios of WDUZ in Green Bay, which happens to operate at 1400. Now, there were hundreds of stations at 1400. It’s probably the most populated of what are called “local” channels, where the stations are limited to broadcasting at no more than 1,000 watts because they were originally designed to serve a limited geographic area. There are five stations at 1400 scattered around Wisconsin alone.

My time reporting the news on WDUZ from 1984 to 1996 was my favorite job ever, until I found myself as editor of the venerable Door County Advocate newspaper a few years later. In both places I worked as part of a quality team that was highly respected in its respective industry, if I say so myself, but eventually they were absorbed into large corporations that didn’t value quality as much as we did.

The mind being as goofy as it is, these memories flooded back as I prepared to post yesterday’s blog entry, which happens to have been the 1,400th consecutive daily post since I started doing this every day on Aug. 1, 2020.

P.S. As near as I can figure out, the Chime Time bell must have been on a cart, that is to say, a tape cartridge programmed to cue itself up so that when it’s time to be played, you press a button and there it is.