WE THREW THEM ALL AWAY!

I f only, SPERDVAC had been founded two years earlier in –1972- we would have saved them all; All of the KFI library of delayed NBC programs.  Mint transcriptions that had never felt a play back stylus!  These were protection copies, never aired.  Like blossoms in a secret garden.  They bloomed and died in silence.

Because KFI was about to celebrate it’s 50^th anniversary in 1972, I was asked to sort through the tall stacks of stored transcriptions. *

The stacks placed flat on the cement floor of the reverberation room**, reached as high as my head.  I was to separate the discs as to their manufacturer.  This required the removing of each label and the setting aside of those discs made of glass.  (The restrictions of WW-two had diverted high quality aluminum to war.)  The substitute glass blanks were thick, heavy and didn’t travel well. 

This accumulating library was the product of the daily recording of all NBC Red programs released on the west coast.  The labels mirror many of those requested from the SPERDVAC library.  These included: One Man’s Family, Portia Faces Life, Life Can Be Beautiful, Helen Trent, Lorenzo Jones, When A Girl Marries, Front Page Farrell, The Guiding Light, Fred Waring, John’s Other Wife and most of your favorites. 

I worked at this, using the scraps of time between my on-air assignments, over a period of several weeks. 

Note: These required turntables and pickup arms that people didn’t have at home.  No one was interested in yesterday’s programs.  Some engineers removed the acetate coatings and used the blanks for bending up small chassis for electronic projects and hardware fittings.

I couldn’t save all this and the discs weren’t mine to save. I did save short voice samples.  Self identifications like, “This is ===== speaking.”  Hundreds of voices, about twenty minutes in length.  These are now in the SPERVAC library, on tape #2153 ‘Sounds of Radio’.  Here too are the sounds that speak to Radiogram copy “Into Thin Air”; Sounds that you would hear as a transmitter engineer. 

I moved two small, station wagon loads of discs to the Packard Division at 10^th and Hope Streets in L.A.  KfI wasn’t saving these discs for a library!  It was for the valued aluminum.

We also sent to salvage, the protection copies of each of these discs. Discs that had never been played.

*Radiogram has carried stories of KFI delay recording, why and how they were cut, synchronized and aired.

**This room contained 100 feet of coiled metal tubing fed by an audio driver. Mikes were set at 25-foot intervals.  These were mixed to sound like mines, caves and tunnels.    nw