Florida Dreams

Our recent Florida vacation brought to mind memories of previous Florida trips. One in particular is worthy of note:

In 1946, my parents traveled to Florida for the express purpose of buying a travel cabin business. I use that term because the term “motel” (motor hotel) had not yet come into use. The kind of travel lodging we are familiar with, namely, a multi-story building with rooms off of a central corridor or off of an outside walkway, was not yet the norm. It wasn’t until 1952 that Mr. Kemmons Wilson, envisioning predictable, quality accommodations for travelers, opened the first Holiday Inn in Memphis, Tennessee. Even as late as 1958 there were only 50 motels, although the number expanded rapidly with the construction of the interstate highway system.

Cabins for travelers were just that: small buildings that contained one bedroom and bath. They generally were separate buildings although some were built as row houses similar to the residential row houses we have in Philadelphia. However, they always were single story.

This is a picture of typical cabins of the period.
During the war years of 1941 to 1945 my father came to believe that travel cabins would be a good business after the war. Our family had visited Florida in 1941 to visit my mother’s sister, Aunt Helen and her husband, Uncle Stanley who lived in Jacksonville. He saw that Florida was already a popular travel destination and it was likely to expand after the war. Another factor was that my sister Natalie had been discharged from the Women’s Army Corp and had not yet found a job in Buffalo. She would help manage the cabin business.

I don’t recall all the various places in Florida that we visited, examining cabin businesses that were for sale. I do recall a place in Daytona Beach that was being considered and another in Kissimmee, Florida.

But the point of this story was a place in Orlando, Florida. Apparently there must have been a place there that was being seriously considered. I remember that we were parked under a southern oak tree on the city square with the court house in the center. It was terribly hot. (Recall that cars in 1946 were not air conditioned.) There was a discussion in the car about whether to proceed with the purchase. I don’t recall all the issues under consideration but I do know that one of them was about me. I had just enrolled to start at Canisius High School in Buffalo in the fall. There was the question about whether I would find a similar school in Orlando. There also was concern about leaving Buffalo and all the relatives. The final, bottom-line point was made by my mother: She asked why anyone would come to Orlando in central Florida. It was not near the Atlantic or Gulf beaches, and was surrounded only by orange groves. That seemed to clinch the argument against buying the property.

We returned home to Buffalo, and dad continued his job. I started at Canisius High School. Natalie, not finding a job in Buffalo, decided to go to California where some of our cousins had settled. They had reported that Los Angeles was booming. This was the beginning of the migration of the family to California; later my sister Arline and family moved there, and eventually my parents retired there.

I never heard one word of regret from my father about not getting into the lodging business in Orlando.

Epilogue: The population of Orlando was over 52,000 in 1950 but climbed to over 235,000 in 2009. Metro Orlando has a population of over 2 million. The Disney Company announced its intention to build an amusement park in Orlando in 1965. Today Orlando is the third most visited city in the United States. Even if we had established ourselves in Orlando in 1946, it still would have been a 19-year wait for the rapid growth to start.

Edited by eki.

Radio Daze

My father liked to tell the story about his father-in-law, Jacob Czerniak, who came to our house to help him install an antenna for our new American Bosch radio. This was in the 1930’s. In those early days of radio, a long antenna was necessary for good reception because the signals were weak. The antenna wire was strung from the radio in the dining room, out the window, up the outside wall and then out to a mast at the end of our house. From there, the wire was strung across the back yard to another mast mounted on the garage roof. Whereupon my grandfather asked: Where does it go from here? He could not understand that the antenna wire simply ended in mid air.

(My grandfather’s puzzlement is not unlike a question I have in trying to understand how people can be walking about with a cell phone to their ear and the signal “knows” where they are; they could be in Seattle or Philadelphia. Another puzzle is seeing multiple people in a relatively small area on separate calls. Are we being irradiated with telephone signals all the time, wherever we are?)

The American Bosch radio was like a piece of furniture, an elegant cabinet standing on its own legs. I was fascinated by the complexity of the “innards” of the radio, as they could easily be seen from the back by sliding out the chassis to see all the glowing vacuum tubes and other electronic parts. The tube filaments were easily visible because the radio tubes were the size of a cucumber. As best I can recall, that radio looked something like this:

This is the radio that the family used to listen to President Roosevelt’s fireside chats. Despite its age, its sound remained good for an AM radio, and the family kept this radio as long as I can remember, at least up until the time I left home for graduate school in 1954.

My own direct involvement with radio began with building a crystal set radio. Before radios were developed that had built-in amplifiers and speaker systems as in our Bosch radio, some adventuresome people had crystal set radios. A crystal set radio is a “passive” radio in the sense that there is no amplification of the signal. For this reason, ear phones are necessary to hear whatever signal is picked up by the antenna. A mineral called galena (lead sulfide), a forerunner of today’s semiconductors, has the property of responding to the faint currents brought in by the antenna. When a “sensitive” spot on the surface of the crystal is touched by a conductive probe, the signal is strong enough to be heard on the ear phones. The probe consists of a straight, stiff wire, mounted on a pivot so that the wire tip can be moved about the surface of the crystal to find a sensitive spot. Hence, crystal set radios were often referred to a “cat whisker’s receivers.”

All that is needed to create a crystal set radio (other than the crystal) are ear phones, an antenna and a winding of copper wire around a cylinder such as a discarded toilet paper core. For those so inclined, this is a sketch of the radio.

My next venture into radio construction did not occur until I was in graduate school, and my room mates and I decided that we needed an FM radio in our dining room where we spent most of our time together. I managed to make a very simple radio from some parts I found in the lab from a circuit design sketched out by one of the instrument makers in the chemistry department.

By the time Bette and I were married in 1959, long playing records, turning at 33 1/3 rpm, had become well established, and with the “extended play” feature, a single disc was capable of holding a complete symphony, albeit on two sides. This was a boom to the classical music recording industry. LP’s soon totally replaced the 78 and 45 rpm records for all types of music. Further, the fidelity of the recordings had increased so that the old record players built to the standards of the 78 rpm records where considered inadequate. However, high quality record turn tables and amplification systems had not yet been marketed at reasonable prices. Consequently, shortly after our marriage, we bought a Heath high fidelity “hifi” kit (Heathkit Mark IV). It took a couple of weeks to assemble a preamplifier and amplifier on a card table in the living room of our rented apartment. Tucked away in our hi-fi cabinet we still have about 166 of those old LP records waiting to be converted to the latest technology.

But the thirst for better and better fidelity was launched. Our next venture in this direction was the purchase of an Ampex reel-to-reel recorder/player. The reels were 7 inches in diameter and had 4 tracks playing at 7 ½ inches per second. Again a complete symphony can be captured on a reel. But in the era of the late 1970’s and 1980’s technology was developing very fast, and the reel-to-reel technology did not catch on widely. We ended up having only about 35 reels of music, and the obsolete recorder/player is still mounted in our hi-fi cabinet.

In the early 1980’s Sony introduced the “Walkman” portable stereo cassette player in the United States. Of course, everyone had to have one. The first introductions in the States were expensive and our children were still young. But it just so happened that Bette and I were going on a vacation in Japan and we thought that we could get a good buy there. After gathering courage to use the Tokyo subway system, we managed to find the Akihabara district in central Tokyo, famous for its many electronics shops. We bought three Walkman that were guarantied to play in the US. They did, but, perhaps because these were early technology models, they were soon superseded by more light weight and reliable models.

We completely missed the 8-track cassette mini-boom. This boom was probably short lived because it was developed under the impetus of the Ford Motor Company to be used in automobiles. Use outside of automobiles did not become widely popular.

Soon analogue technology was replaced by digital technology and there was a mass movement to CD recordings. Compact, stand-alone CD players quickly became available and our home acquired a “quality player” for serious music listening as well as CD units as part of boom boxes and radio/CD combination players in various rooms.

However, that was not the end of the pursuit. MP3 technology came on the scene via computers and soon we were able to hear high quality music from devices no larger that a cigarette lighter or a thin stack of playing cards. These latter devices also can show photos and short video clips.

And finally, even radio has gone digital. We now have an HD (high definition) FM radio, probably the first of many as we will one day be urged to replace all our radios with this latest technology.

What’s next?

A related link (mentions 78 rpm records):
Fantasia, Toscanini, and Music in the Air

Fantasia, Toscanini, and Music in the Air

As I watch our grandson, Bilalay, grow up, I have been thinking about how different my own early childhood was, and wondering about how my various experiences as a youngster may have influenced my later life. I have already commented on how the simple act of traveling to and from my dad’s fishing places on Lake Erie may have influenced my interest in science and, in particular, chemistry. [See blog: Fishing, Epilogue Part 2, May 11, 2009] Here I speculate about some possible sources of my pleasure in classical music. It remains to be seen how Bilalay is being influenced by growing up in the digital age
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Although opera music wafted through our home every Saturday afternoon emanating from a radio mounted atop the refrigerator in the kitchen, I believe my first formal exposure to classical music probably was seeing Walt Disney’s animated film Fantasia.
I clearly remember being taken to see Fantasia by my sister Natalie in one of the fancy theaters in downtown Buffalo,. I was ten years old and Natalie joined the Women’s Army Corps later in the year (1942). I can still see Leopold Stokowski stride to the podium, not knowing what to expect, but quickly being transported into the world of cartoon animation a few moments after the music began. Even to this day, I have strong visual images of the Mickey Mouse character donning the wizard’s hat and cape, and commanding the broom to carry water, resulting in a flood because he did not know the magic words that would stop the broom; all of this was to the music of Paul Dukas’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice. I can still picture grazing deer being frightened by an approaching storm as suggested by a thunderous passage in Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony (#6). I have a clear image of the fearsome birds flying about in the Night on Bald Mountain (Modest Mussorgsky).

While Fantasia was widely applauded as a landmark in animation in which the craft of animation was applied to the interpretation of music, there were some who called it kitsch. These critics felt that music is an abstract art form and that any intrepreation was simply one person’s vision of the meaning of the music, if music has any visual meaning at all. In any event, as a youngster, it seemed that the visual scenes were entirely appropriate to the accompanying music. As it turned out, as an adult, I have the ability to enjoy music on its own without the necessity of creating a mental image to accomany it.
(How has the brain stored these memories for 67 years?)

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After WW II in 1948, there were less than a half million black and white television sets in the US, and half of those were in the New York City area. Despite such a meager audience, NBC was courageous enough to broadcast a classical music program featuring the renowned conductor Arturo Toscanini who at the time was 81 years old. Or, perhaps, it was merely to give an innovative forum to the NBC Symphony Orchestra.

My friend’s parents had a washing machine repair business a few blocks from our home in Buffalo. With the coming of the “television age,” they decided to carry television sets as part of their retail business. When a Toscanini program was scheduled, my friend Paul would invite me to come to the store after hours. The one television in the window was turned around so that it could be viewed in the darkened store.

In those early days, TV was literally a vast waste land meaning that the few programs that were broadcast were in prime time only. For much of the day only a test pattern was broadcast so that TV owners could adjust their sets and television stores could display the reception quality on their various TV brands. Nothing was automatic as it is now: There were several controls at the front of the TV to adjust focus, brightness, and contrast; to adjust the height and width to make a more perfectly round test pattern; and to adjust for vertical and horizontal hold to prevent “rolling” or “tearing” of the picture. Unfortunately, these controls were not independent in the sense that making an adjustment of one parameter would often result in the required readjustment of another parameter.

After much set adjustment and with great anticipation, the Toscanini program came on and what Paul and I saw was almost a silhouette of a white haired figure, who with obvious stern intensity, brought forth music of great beauty. Perhaps it was not the music itself but the mesmerization of the new experience of seeing and hearing musicians in real time playing from a distant location – tele-vision, that made it so memorable.

The National Broadcasting Company eventually broadcast ten Toscanini concerts from 1948 to 1954 at which point the network disbanded the NBC Symphony Orchestra. I don’t recall how many of these I saw at my friend’s store or on my parent’s TV that they purchased sometime in the early 1950s.

In graduate school, I started a collection of thirty-three and a third rpm long-play records. I was constantly reminded of my Toscanini experience a few years earlier when I saw his black and white image appearing on the dust jackets of recordings of those historic broadcasts.

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There were perhaps other influences, equally subtle: While doing my homework on the kitchen table, I would hear my mother listening to the Voice of Firestone and the Bell Telephone Hour, both featuring light classical music once a week on the radio. She was particularly fond of Eleanor Steber, an American operatic soprano who often sang on these programs. She also enjoyed it when the Ed Sullivan Show on television featured a singer like Kate Smith.

I recall that my sister Arline bought a 78 rpm vinyl record of Chopin’s Polonaise. I was often called upon to quickly run to the phonograph to turn the record over to play the other side. Because of the short recording capacity of 78s, only about roughly half of the 7 minute Polonaise could be recorded on one side. Since the Polonaise has a certain momentum to it, no doubt something was lost in the transition. Nevertheless, given the state of the art at the time, this record was played over and over again with no concern about the loss of musical continuity.

By any measure, our family would not be considered classical music devotees. Nevertheless, as I look back on those years, there apparently was enough of this type of music in the air that I gravitated toward it as an adult.

Psycho-Economic-Babble

On the Sunday talk shows (February 7, 2010), we heard a lot of psycho-economic-babble about why the unemployment rate remains high. Many of the explanations came from the mouths of supposedly knowledgeable commentators. Complex explanations were offered which ranged all the way from the huge size of the national debt to fears about the cost of the proposed health care legislation and to concerns about possible taxes on business.


Actually the explanation is much more elementary: The personal savings rate increased to over four percent in 2009 from the three percent range or less in 2008. Presumably the higher-than-previous savings rate has persisted into 2010. That is a one-third decrease in purchasing power that has been removed from the economy. While decreasing the national debt, giving tax cuts to business, or removing the uncertainty about health care costs may influence the unemployment rate in the long run, none of these factors will directly and immediately increase the spending for goods and services which is the ultimate driver of the economy. Hiring will readily begin as soon as businesses have orders on their books to fill regardless of the psycho-economic cloud overhead. People will start buying goods and services at a more brisk rate once they feel that their future will be more secure, and that won’t happen until they see that they and more of their neighbors have jobs again. This is what makes the problem a vicious circle.