Sorting through Memory Lane

Today I spent an hour or so in a well-loved used book store of national fame. I went to a different one than I normally go to. I was looking for a specific book, and I've never seen the author at the store closest to me. And it's always interesting to see the difference in selection based on location. Anyway, after I found the exact book I was looking for in excellent condition, I noticed three rows of sleeveless 45 records. And there was a sign in front of them that read: "Sleeveless 45s / 10 cents each." For 10 cents each, I decided I could at least look. For 10 cents each, I walked out of the store with one book and 42 sleeveless records. Yes, you read that correctly, 42 45's.

When I was a girl, every summer we would travel north to the valley of dairy cows, Creamies, and Napoleon Dynamite. Well, we didn't know Napoleon Dynamite back then, but my grandfather did go to the same high school. My mother grew up in the University town there, and one of my aunties still lives in the old family house, which is also a second home for my immediate family. The bedroom for us kids upstairs happened to be equipped with drawers full of my mother's old 45's, a record player with one of those gadgets that lets you stack a number of 45's so you don't have to change records every 5 minutes, and a large creaky floor space for dancing. We passed many a summer night in that room having singing and dancing parties with cousins (there were LP's too, so it wasn't all 45's).

In my nostalgic frame of mind, when I saw the rows of 45's for 10 cents at the store today, I had to look. Even the labels themselves brought back all sorts of memories of childhood. Of carefully placing records on the player, flipping little levers to put it on the right setting for the right size of record, and watching the needle fall sometimes in the wrong place, of replacing the needle manually. Each scratch I saw brought to my mind the memories I have of skips that became part of the song. "To Know Him" had a skip in the instrumental introduction that would keep repeating until you manually nudged the needle along its way. I can hear it in my mind now.


So there I stood, looking at each and every 45 there. And I don't even have a record player. But I plan to some day. And here's what I found: Glen Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Nat King Cole, Vera Lynn, Patty Paige, The Mills Brothers, Jimmie Rodgers (as in "Honeycomb", not the country singer -- although that would have been really cool), the Lettermen, the Kingston Trio, the Mamas and the Papas, Anne Murray, folk music, and much more. I passed up quite a bit as well: Pat Boone, Eddie Fischer, Paul Anka, Barry Manilow, Barbara Streisand. (There was at least one Pat Boone record in the collection from childhood with him singing Tutti Frutti, which was pretty ridiculous in a classic Pat-Boone-purification-of-good-music sort of way. If they had had that one, I would have bought it for historical reasons, but they didn't.)

A couple of the 45's that we children enjoyed the most were the Four Preps' "26 Miles" and "Lazy Summer Night". "26 Miles" meant so much to me that a friend of mine even included it in a CD mix of songs that she put together for me in high school. We absolutely loved that song. Still never been to Santa Catalina (that I'm aware of), but it must be waiting for me and my lover boy to visit, since it is the island of romance. So there I stood looking through all of these 45s today, and of course I was thinking about how cool it would be to find any of our old records in this group. As if on cue, the next record I looked at was "Lazy Summer Night" by the Four Preps! I snagged it of course, but I couldn't help thinking, "Too bad it wasn't on the same record as 26 Miles." But only a few minutes later into the sorting, there was "26 Miles" in front of me.

I'm not sure of the condition of any of the records. Most of them look alright, but I'm going to make sleeves for them, and then maybe I'll take them down to campus one of these days and see how they are. Maybe some people think a pile of 45's is just a pile of out-dated junk, but I'm excited about them. Someday I'll have a record player to listen to them and all of the other records I'm sure I'll collect over the years.