Old tapes

Sirs, Madames,

Rooting around, looking for something else entirely, I found three old casette tapes today.

1. Having lunch with King Clancy and rookie Wendel Clark at the Hot Stove Lounge in 1986, shortly before the HHOFer's death. 120 min.
2. Bret and Owen Hart yakking for 90 minutes in their gym in '92 (I had clipped their parents' listing in the Calgary phone book and dropped it inside the case).
3. A late night booze-a-thon interview with Morley Callaghan (NYer writer, Canadian literary icon, former sparring partner of Hemingway, friend of Fitzgerald and [the other] Joyce) shortly before his death in the late 80s. 90 min, stops and starts.

Does anyone ever stumble across their old tapes? Notebooks, I know. But what do you do to preserve the tapes? Do they have an archival value? I guess I'll make audio files.

o-<

 

My dad just gave me a whole box of Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts on VHS and instructed me to sell them on eBay.

 

I still have my tape recorder, but my parents got me a digital voice recorder a few years ago for Christmas. It's seen better days (I dropped it in a bowl of chicken soup and amazingly, it still works.) but I've done so many great interviews with that thing. The best part is I was able to transfer them onto my computer, so I can have them years and years from now.

 

For the longest time I was looking for tapes of an interview I did with my grandpa in 1999 for a story I did on his Silver Star. I talked to him in a hospice, a month before he died, but he was still of perfect mind. We had like a three-hour conversation and there's no way in hell I would have thrown the tapes away. But I could never find them. Finally, last April, my mom found a tape in one of her genealogy bins, but that's all she found. Still, I at least had an hour of grandpa talking about his army days and listening to it definitely brought me back to that hospice room. It's pretty scratchy, though. I'd love to get it converted to something digital.

 

I found an old cassette the other day I was going to put into the rotation and discovered it was a alternative top-20 countdown show from 1994 I'd recorded off the radio.

 

BYH?

Going back to college, I was always told to get rid of taped interviews, notebooks and what-not on the off chance that somebody might sue the paper for whatever reason.

 

Interesting. I was taught to save everything for the same reason.

 

Yeah, assuming one is a good reporter, I would think records would come in handy.

 

There are a few old cassettes floating around my place from the last days of ManCow in San Fran including the skit where his flunkies strung panty-hose from one end of the Golden Gate Bridge to the other. It was funny as shit at the time.

Somewhere else around here should be micro-tapes from a long Bob Knight interview, complete with unprintable phrases, from my days at the Indiana Daily Student.

I'm not sure which set has less value.

 

That's not how your paper's lawyers probably look at it.

 

Sirs, Madames,

Few come out of the woods to sue you for something that was written 20+ years ago ... in defunct publications where two of the aforementioned stories appeared. Especially dead people ... which is three of the five people on the tape. The sad part is that I can't find the tape of my interview with drunken Jim Niedhart on the night of the '92 election ("What the fuck is an electoral college, what happens if ya didn't go to college, etc").

o-<

 

Don't leave us hanging. How the hell did that happen? I've heard of dropping electronics a lot of places--urinals are no. 1 with a bullet--but a bowl of chicken soup? That's awesome.