I met him at the record store…

Lately, I've been feeling especially nostalgic for my youth, those bygone days when life was easier and I was younger…much younger! I know this has a lot to do with today's economy and the struggles many of us are facing as a result, but right now it probably has more to do with the fact that I am facing one of those milestone birthdays in a few months. Yep folks, the BIG 6-0 is right around the corner.

Sixty, it just rolls off the tongue so easily. Crap! I remember well that when I was young, 60 sounded ancient. Oh wait, it still does! Ha! Time just crept up and I'm not that svelte, young beach girl any more. Oh well, at least the beach is still a HUGE part of my life and for that I am grateful.

Anyway, like I said, I've been reminiscing lately and one of the things that has come to mind is how the way we listen to music has changed over the years (along with my waistline).

I LOVE music and when I was just getting ready to enter my teen years we moved just a block away from a record store. Yeah, that's what we called them then…record stores. Guess what they sold there?

I don't remember the name of the place, we just referred to it as the record store, but it was located at the corner of Balboa and Devonshire Blvds. in Granada Hills, California. The front of the store was full of racks and racks of records from every genre and in the back room they taught guitar, bass and drums. The year was 1964, the summer I turned thirteen and except for spending my weekends in Malibu, there was no place I'd rather be than at the record store. My allowance had gone from being spent on candy and comic books to 45s. For you younguns' out there, a 45 was how we bought the music of our favorite bands in the good ol' days.

There was more to the record store than just being the place to go for your latest tunes though — it was a hangout for teens. My girlfriends and I would be there for hours and hours, looking through the selections of the latest hits and flirting with boys. The malt shop was for the 50s, for me and my friends, the place to "be" in the 60s was the record store or the beach. In those early days I was buying the Beach Boys, Jan and Dean, Dick Dale, the Chantays, the Safaris and anyone else who was recording surf music.



Much more so than in school, I learned how to talk and interact boys while we hung out listening to great music. The conversation was easy, we talked about music and surfing. In our world, nothing else really existed at that point in our lives. Of course, then we went our separate ways and my girlfriends and I giggled over who we thought was CUTE! Where did we do this? Why at pajama parties! Now they call them sleepovers, but back in the day, we all gathered at someone's house to discuss our latest crushes and to, you guessed it, play our records! What did we play them on you ask? Well, who remembers these…

Besides your pajamas and your records, when you went to a pajama party, you also brought your own record player. This was easy to do because they came in a little suitcase all their own…

Once there the first thing you did was look for an outlet to plug in and then the fun would begin. We took turns playing our 45s and much to the chagrin of the host parents, there were moments when several records would be playing at the same time. We didn't care; we laughed, sang along, and shared stories of who liked who. Ah, life was so easy then.

I found the images of this RCA Portable Record Player at the All Unique Etsy Shop. Sadly, it has been sold, but from what I read the owner of this shop finds, repairs and sells them when they're available. I'd love to have one, but except for a few, my 45s have all disappeared over the years. Do any of you still have your collections? My friend Marice, in California told me recently that she still has all of hers.

There was only one thing wrong with a portable record player, while you could take it with you to lots of places, you couldn't take it to the beach. So how did we dance around the sand you ask? Why we had these…

Mine looked something like this 1957 Sony TR-63 Transistor Radio…

"A transistor radio is a small portable radio receiver using transistor-based circuitry. Following their development in 1954 they became the most popular electronic communication device in history, with billions manufactured during the 1960s and 1970s. Their pocket size sparked a change in popular music listening habits, for the first time allowing people to listen to music anywhere they went." –Wikipedia

Yeah, I'm feeling nostalgic for the 60s. Since then we've gone through the boom box, 8-track tapes, cassettes, the Walkman, CDs and now we have these…

Images via Apple, Mosaic by Shellbelle

I think iPods are very cool, and being able to download tunes is very easy and convenient, but I feel sorry for the youth of today, who can't hang out at the local record store with their friends and friends-to-be. Most often, I see folks with iPods in their ears, talking or texting on their cell phones and the world around them is just a blur. That interaction with others is slowly disappearing and I just think that's plain sad. Now one good thing has come out of all this, I don't have to ask someone to turn down their music when I'm at the beach! Does that make me a hypocrite? Darn tootin', but hey, when you're old you get a license to be cranky!


Today's Ocean Fact: The Pacific Ocean, the largest ocean on the planet, is bigger than all of Earth’s continents put together.  –Discovery Education Planet Ocean