I loved this old boombox. Dual cassette decks with high-speed dubbing. I’d stay up late into the night recording songs I liked off the radio. (Back when they played more than a handful of songs each day.) I still have a big box of those old mix tapes in my music room. I need to dub a few of them over to MP3, because I really did have some great stuff.
The mix tape is a dying, and subtle art. Many do’s and don’ts. First of all, you’re using someone else’s poetry to express how you feel. This is a delicate thing … There are a lot of rules.
I searched around for a video that I love which explains this, but I couldn’t find it on the old YouTubes. This is as close as I could get:
Anyway, back to the picture. There are a few other little nostalgic nuggets worth pointing out.
- Notice the rollerskating bear in Santa garb. Classic late 80s kitsch.
- That Auburn Tigers cap was a mainstay in my collection well into high school when it was no longer close to white and probably supported an ecosystem of its own under the brim. I now occasionally wear a similar “Cotton Bowl Champs” variant. But it’s much cleaner.
- Those golf balls were likely all lost by March.
- The most sure-fire way to date this photo is probably the “fiber optic” tree sitting on top of the cable box.
2 Comments
Neil · 18 December 2008 at 5:05 PM
I got a similar boombox at about that age. Unfortunately my family’s annual car trip to Missouri was just a short 24 hours later – where my boombox sat between my sister and myself on the back seat so I could listen to headphones and she could launch her annual car sickness all over it. Never was the same after that.
Bo · 18 December 2008 at 5:38 PM
That’s one of the saddest things I’ve ever heard.
That sort of thing is why my family got an enormous Chevy van right around the time this picture was taken. That way my sister and I could be separated by several feet. Whether that was necessitated by illness or disciplinary reasons, it was most certainly handy for my parents.
As an added bonus, it was an interesting challenge learning to drive behind the wheel of a full size conversion van. (You definitely learned to use your mirrors properly since you couldn’t see out the curtained windows in the back.) When I turned 16 it made my tiny little pickup feel like an MG.
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