A HiFi from Don Draper’s Apartment

We recently found this hifi in a local thrift shop, and after a little cleanup it now sits in our living room. It definitely has the Mad Men-era design, which we think is a pretty cool look. Click here to read more about it at joesradiopage.com.

jtl

Revere Eight

This is the Revere Eight 8mm movie camera my dad used since the 1950s to capture our family events. It’s because of this that all my childhood memories look like The Wonder Years. He gave me this camera a few years ago, and I hope to one day get it working again.

jtl

Christmas Airchecks

Here’s an early Christmas present for all of you: a pair of archive files that each contain 90 minutes of somewhat innocuous holiday music.  The real bonus, though, is hidden in the recordings:  between the usual bits of Nat King Cole, Kenny G, and 101 Strings are little snippets of Chicago media history. These are recordings of two Chicago radio …

jtl

jtl

Flash and the Pan

In the summer of 1979, a song called “Hey St Peter” climbed into the pop charts. It had a unique, new wave sound with lyrics spoken in a tinny voice, a driving beat, and a catchy hook. I remember thinking at the time this was what would happen if Dire Straits got together with The …

jtl

No Static At All

Tonight, Lisa and I watched the 1978 movie FM on VH-1 Classic. This is a time capsule of the late 1970s, complete with feathered hair on the guys, perms on the women, and a plotline about Sticking It To The Man, ‘Cause He Just Doesn’t Get It. The movie centers around the operations at a …

jtl

Nite-Owl: 25 Years Later

25 years ago this Friday night, I programmed my parents’ VCR to record the first hour of a television show that ran overnight on WFLD-TV channel 32. It wasn’t so much a “show” as it was a “service.” Nite-Owl was the in-the-clear broadcast of a videotext service called Keyfax. I wrote about Keyfax/Nite-Owl in a …

jtl

Buttons

This past weekend, Lisa and I stopped at a nearby garage sale. These people had a ton of stuff, including one of those Coleman screened-in things– you know, the ones that look like a tent only it’s all screen. (It was a steal at $45, but we passed anyway.) At one point, Lisa looked down …

jtl

The Records

I admit that I have a soft spot in my heart for pop music– good pop music. It probably stems from growing up listening to my older siblings’ Beatles records as well as the stuff we used to hear on WLS and WCFL. In the summer of 1979, there was a two-page ad in Billboard …

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jtl