A week and a half ago, I heard my father’s voice for the first time in more than 20 years. That would have been extraordinary enough if only because my dad died in 1983, but the words I heard so recently were spoken long before that — more than a decade before my birth.
In the years since his death, I have heard from my father many times, figuratively if not literally. He still appears occasionally in my dreams. He influences me in all sorts of ways. I have his handwriting and hairline, or soon will. He left me his love of language, his sense of humor and his appetite for news. But actual voices from beyond the grave are generally beyond me, except when technology assists, as it did in this case.
Going through my dad’s office soon after he died, I found a stack of strange records. Unlike the slick, flexible vinyl LPs I had known in the ’60s and ’70s, these were heavy, thick and brittle, with grooves on only one side. Most were also much bigger than the music albums I had grown up with, way too wide to fit on a standard turntable — and even in 1983, turntables were becoming not-so-standard equipment. Because of the diameter of these discs, I had no easy way to listen to them, but I could see from their yellowed labels what they were: recordings from my father’s radio days in the late 1940s and early ’50s, before magnetic audio tape became the standard recording medium for such programming.
By the time I was born in ’59, Dad had taken his first steps away from the microphone and into management. As a kid, I had never heard him on the air — and I wouldn’t for many years to come.
I knew my father’s radio recordings would always mean a lot to me, but I didn’t know what to do with them back in the mid-’80s, so I packed them away. Over the decades that followed, I moved more times than I care to count or recall, each time carefully hand-carrying the old records to my new home and storing them where I thought they’d be safe.
With the dawn of the digital age, I made several consecutive new year’s resolutions to transfer the recordings to some more modern medium, but the online directions I found for doing so seemed complicated and I never quite found the time or courage to try.
Then I came across the kind of device designed for those easily intimidated by technology — a retro-inspired record-player-and-CD-recorder-in-one. The good news is that using it was actually as easy as it looked.
The bad news is that the records sounded as bad as they looked. Still, through the static, came the sound of my father-to-be at the age of about 26 or 27. He was only a year or two out of the army, and even newer to Washington, D. C., where he worked for WWDC. I don’t remember Dad with a New York accent, but in those early post-war years he sounded like just what he was: a guy just off the bus from the Bronx. To my ears today, he sounds unfathomably young and a little like Groucho Marx — nothing like the impressive baritone I recall from my childhood.
The first track I listened to was labeled in grease pencil, right on the record surface, “Barber Shop Interview.” It was what today we would call a feature piece, an “as live” — that is, unedited — interview with Washington’s first female barber to own her own shop, and with one of her customers.
Apart from a more mature vocal sound, I’m not sure what I expected. Maybe some sexist remarks or patronizing treatment of the woman who was the story’s subject. My father never behaved that way around me, but this was from the ’40s. Men in the movies I’ve seen from that era tended to talk tough, wear fedoras and use words like “dame.”
My father did have some hats, but I heard no Bogart-like language, nor anything I would even call insensitive — unless you count the story’s premise, that it was novel to find a woman who had chosen to be a barber rather than a “beauty operator.”
I can’t be sure I’ve got the spelling right, but my father introduced her as Miss Hilda Nordbak. He described her giving a male customer something called a “suntan shave.” Miss Nordbak had come to America from her native Sweden, settling initially in New York, then moving during World War II, as so many people did, to Washington — “for patriotic reasons,” my father said, putting words in Miss Nordbak’s mouth.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” my father said to his listeners, “I might explain right now that Miss Nordbak is massaging Mr. Ralph Glenn, who seems to be very, very happy and very, very comfortable.”
And so it went: “Folks, this is a beautiful barber shop here and Miss Nordbak is a very, very attractive young woman. Mr. Ralph Glenn is still smiling peacefully there, and he seems to be at peace with the whole world.”
Dad didn’t claim to be Edward R. Murrow, and bombs weren’t falling on London when this report aired. He asked a series of chatty questions and tossed back to the studio, having adequately chronicled the birth of barbering across sexes in our nation’s capital.
I still don’t know how I’ll play the other albums. They’re 16 inches across and my nifty new machine can”t handle that. I may yet regret the purchase. My wife’s comprehensive Carpenters collection has already come out of the closet and soon will be sending its soothing sounds to all corners of our home. The neighbors mentioned some long-dormant disco LPs they’d sure like to dub over to CD, too.
But I think now that I’ve begun, I’ll keep working on digitizing my dad’s old radio recordings. Somewhere there’s a turntable big enough, and I’m more curious than ever about what the rest of the records hold.
In fact, when I’m done with Dad, I know the next archival effort awaiting me. It involves a box of my own early on-air work from the mid-’80s — in the form of three-quarter-inch videotape that will be about as easy to play as those moldy, over-sized old albums. The cassettes capture me doing TV news at about the age my father was when he visited Hilda Nordbak’s beautiful barber shop.
