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This was taken in Los Angeles, 1956. The present just opened is a Webcor record player. To the left is my great uncle Paul and the right is my grandpa, seen later washing the car with my dad.
I wonder if there's a tree under all that tinsel. Scanned from a Kodak safety negative. View full size.
Tony you and tterrace may need to start your own site or have Dave hire you both as permanent contributors (pay you with real money) I do love ALL the member contributions, but the ones you both have, something special about them.
Webster-Chicago Corp. was the parent company of Webcor, a leading manufacturer of Wire & Tape Recorders. They pioneered the wire recorder in the 1950s. Those units fed a spool of wire, that was on a reel resembling tightly wound fishing line, through a recording head of the player/recorder. The wire was not unlike piano wire, the recorded sound was fairly primitive and we sold the recorders in the $300-500 range, not a small sum in the 1950s. Once the reel-to-reel tape recorders came in the wire products were doomed. Of course the cassette tape did in the reel-to-reel, the CD did it to the cassette. Now they're all dead or dying. The top recording device makers of the wire era were Webcor, VM (Voice of Music), Wilcox-Gay and the ubiquitous General Electric.
It was a slightly earlier Webcor portable phonograph that transitioned our family from the 78rpm era to the LP (in today's terms, think of going from VHS to DVD). That was a bit before 1950 when we won it in a church raffle. Later, it became the centerpiece of my brother's hi-fi system: it's at the bottom of the stack behind the tubed amplifier in this shot. The Devo-style lamp is an eye-catcher, but so is the ottoman in the lower left, looking like an orphan from a Rat-Pack era Las Vegas lounge.
Wow, Tony. The family photos you've posted really evoke their time and place very clearly. I hope your grandfather and great uncle won't take offense when I observe that in this shot they look a lot like the Beav and his brother Wally (Jerry Mathers and Tony Dow), in the show that had its first season the following year.
A little early for Devo on the phono, but the hat is already there...
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