NOSTALGIA: KIDDIE RECORDS

The weather has been unsettled – even rainy – so Mike decided to take on a project to clean his old rocking chair. Purchased when Murray was a baby, the chair served to rock five babies. Now he thinks he might enjoy watching football from that chair, especially if it had a cushion on the back. He cleaned the wood and then treated it with lemon oil; then he removed the seat and we will take it to an upholsterer in town to be recovered and also have the cushion made. Meanwhile, I researched a favorite subject of mine – kiddie records, 1950s vintage.

My parents believed in giving a child a basic foundation in important information – nursery rhymes, fairy tales, and Bible stories. Mother put a lot of importance on memory work and taught me the nursery rhymes from the time I could talk. I was not as good as my sister, Harriet, who from an early age was an exceptionally gifted "repetitionist," according to Mother. She only compared Harriet and me – the oldest and the much youngest – because, of course, she probably didn't have the time to work with the three in-between children. My dad read fairy tales to me as bedtime stories – Anderson and Grimm – as well as other children's literature he recalled from his own childhood, such as Alice in Wonderland and The Wind in the Willows.

Besides working with me and reading to me, they provided me with story records. The first ones were 45 rpm. I remember especially Three Billy Goats Gruff and Chicken Little. At first these were played for me on the family's phonograph. My brother Chuck, a teen-ager at the time, would entertain me – and himself, of course – by playing the 45s at 78 rpm. Chicken Little was really funny! I'm guessing I was five when my parents gave me my own "record player," and Mother subscribed to the "record of the month" club through which I received about two dozen 78 rpm story records that I loved. My favorites were The Carrot Seed, Cinderella, Midsummer Night's Dream, and Wait 'til the Moon Is Full (about a little owl and his mother).

Well, you know how it is. Time goes on and as children grow up, interests change. I grew to love music and LPs and the record player was replaced by a radio and a teen-ager's stereo. My mother gave the records to my sister, Nina, for her children. Nina put the stack of records on a shelf in a closet and something fell from above and broke the edge off many of the records. The Carrot Seed, everybody's absolute favorite, broke to smithereens. But – the story has a happy ending. In the early years of being married, I told Murray the sad story of how my favorite story record met its demise. As it happened, Murray left soon after to visit his mother in California, and while he was there, they visited an antique / collectibles shop or a flea market or some such – and there was the record – The Carrot Seed. So, Murray bought it and brought it home to me.

When my own children came along, we didn't use the story records much. I tried to provide that experience for them, but they weren't much interested. Besides, it wasn't just the records that did it, you know. It was the experience of being in control myself – of using a child's phonograph to play what I wanted to hear. While I didn't realize how much the world's mediums would change, I did know my records were collectible and that no child should just play with them. In the early '90s, my brother Chuck took all the story records and copied them onto cassette tapes, more to preserve the content than for frequent use. I really appreciated his time and efforts to do that. Now, of course, the medium has changed again.

I believe I still have those records. I just don't know where they are since the move. AND – lest you fear these things are lost in the electronic age, be assured you can find kiddie records online at Kiddie Rekord King, who will gladly sell you your choice from his library of 11,000 titles on CD or for MP3 download. (He does not sell his records.) Today I listened to sound clips at that site. KW