The Unlikely Afterlife of My Father’s Hi-Fi
It emerged from the bowels of our garage, bringing a bit of him back with it.
First published in my Substack newsletter, Unsorted but Significant.
I MUST HAVE BEEN about 8.
I remember sitting in our downstairs family room, listening to one of my father’s favorite albums — the soundtrack to the 1954 Broadway revival of “The Threepenny Opera,” a well-traveled musical about class struggle with cultural roots in England and Weimar Germany.
This was, I will grant you, odd fare for a Gen-X child in the Pittsburgh suburbs in the mid-1970s, the era of “Jesus Christ Superstar.” But my parents were older, born in the early 1920s, and the music my father listened to was, shall we say, pre-British Invasion. Very pre.
But the music was compelling and haunting and meaningful. It was about a roguish (and singing) murderer named Macheath, or Mack the Knife, but it was also about so many other things. And my father would go on to spend years with me, listening to records on his huge wooden stereo cabinet — which I wasn’t allowed to touch, all the way up until I was — and teaching me what the music meant and where it came from. All the while, we sat next to the stereo, which was — like the piano across the room — an obvious treasure and anchor for him.
So many performers. So much music. Lotte Lenya. Glenn Miller. Benny Goodman. Edith Piaf. Rosemary Clooney. Rachmaninoff. And every December, the Christmas album given away at the A&P supermarket over at Northway Mall that taught me names like Mahalia Jackson, Percy Faith and Mitch Miller & the Gang. And, perhaps most interestingly, a record series called “I Can Hear It Now,” which trafficked in curated (and thrilling) actualities from American news events and probably contributed to my eventual decision to become a journalist.
Many of these names — and these memories — had been mostly gone, lost in the mists of childhood. But this week, after my 21-year-old son and I dragged the 1960s Magnavox hi-fi from its dusty berth in the garage, polished it and made it an anchor piece of furniture in our living room, they are back.
This is what I’m pondering, nine years this month after my dementia-riddled father took his last breath at age 92: an imposing item from the days when technology was designed to look like furniture rather than the future. A 1960s-era stereo cabinet — a “hi-fi,” if you will, though he never called it that — quietly stuffed with the memories of a music-loving man long dead (him) and a childhood long gone (mine).
THINGS, INANIMATE OBJECTS, can contain memories. Or, at least, they can summon them if the time and the place and the moment are right. I would even go so far as to say that things might have souls.
How do you continue conversations with people you have lost, even as you grapple with the grief of their departures? That journey has suffused my last decade (and, not incidentally, this “Unsorted but Significant” project as well). And if there is one thing that living in a generational house does — as I excavate the stuff that belonged to my forebears year by year and decide what to discard, what to preserve and what to emotionally investigate — it makes certain that my parents’ voices in some form are never very far away.
This can be exhilarating. It can also be suffocating. I’ve been accused in the recent past of “swimming in grief,” which I suppose is not an entirely unfair characterization at times. In navigating the various waterways of grief in my life over the past 25 years, both professional and personal, I have found that the currents have carried me into backwaters and dark lagoons where I don’t necessarily want to be stranded.
Not the case with this stereo, though. I don’t want to sound like a broken record (see what I did there?), but I’ll say it again: Grief and loss do not always travel a straight line. What I’m learning along this journey is that they also don’t always present as sadness, either. As we drag this richly paneled walnut beast from its berth in the dark back of the garage, where it sat across nearly 20 cold and damp winters and nearly 20 hot and dry summers, I feel no sense of loss, no negative feelings, no paralyzing grief. What I feel is, simply, gratitude. And a high-octane gratitude it is, too.
Why might that be? I have a theory.
I’ve noticed that songs from a particular era are more powerful if you haven’t heard them straight through across the years. So for me, who came of age with the music of the 1980s, an oft-heard standard like “Take on Me” or “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” is much less potent in summoning emotional memories than more obscure songs like Nik Kershaw’s “Wouldn’t It Be Good” or Laura Branigan’s “Gloria.” That’s because those latter two aren’t always on regular 1980s playlists, so the take-me-back-in-time wallop that they pack is more concentrated because we haven’t been hearing them all along.
The same thing can be true with objects, I think. The rooms of our house are brimming with things that I knew and loved in my childhood, but they are largely background noise because I see them every day. Drag out something that’s been dormant, though, like this Magnavox Solid State High-Fidelity Stereo™, and suddenly the memories flow freely.
(Side note: I now know a great deal about this device because both my parents were obsessed with carefully preserving the owner’s manuals, and sometimes the original receipts, of pretty much every item of significance that they ever procured. In that respect, I am my parents’ child for sure.)
AS MY SON AND I carefully shepherd the stereo out of the preposterously overstuffed garage (it was his idea to resurrect it) and into the sunlight to bring it around to the front of the house and into the front door, it occurs to me: Back in 2007, when we moved in and my parents moved out to retirement and eventual decreptitude, I took it out to the garage through the inside door. Which means that the contraption had never been outside the Anthony home since Lyndon Johnson was in the White House.
That in itself feels … disruptive to continuity somehow, as if we’re violating some sacrosanct pocket of time and space simply by extracting it in the first place.
We carry it upstairs — another disruption. The machine was always downstairs in the family room, which was his domain as much as the Scandinavian-furniture-filled living room upstairs was my mother’s. We place it along one side of the room, and it matches the largely Asian-inflected (from our travels) wood-and-leather decor perfectly. I sit down and contemplate it, and the memories rush over me.
There are memories of music. He, like the son who helped me carry the stereo up, was a musical soul. Sometimes he’d play the old Grinnell Brothers piano, also in the family room, to accompany a record he’d put on the stereo. When I got old enough, he’d let me put the record on and even adjust the automatic needle with my little hands if it skipped. He patiently (always patiently) explained to me how some records spun at 33 rpm, others at 45 rpm. Older, more brittle ones, of which he had many, rotated at 78 rpm, something that would propel me into an entirely new world when I wrote a book that involved sorties into early 20th century music and recording. And the rare record even spun ultra-slowly at 16 rpm, which few record players could even handle. But this one could! The exclamation point there comes from my memory of his excitement at that, a rare exclamation from a man who almost never raised his voice.
There are memories of the artists and albums I’d already mentioned. There are memories of him taking me to a music store that smelled like someone’s dusty closet, and holding my hand (not merely out of affection but to prevent my hyperactive self from upending something) as a man reached down into an unseen cubbyhole and extracted the perfect replacement needle for the tone arm so we could play records again.
But this this newly rediscovered contraption pulls from my brain memories that have nothing to do with music as well.
Most of them are memories of the family room in general, with the stereo keeping stalwart sentinel across the years as fires were built in the brick fireplace; as various Christmas trees arrived, sprouted presents and then departed; as guests wandered in and out through the 1970s and 1980s; as his beloved aquariums filled up with water and tropical fish and then vanished, empty, under the stairs and into a storage area I remain afraid to crawl into even after living here again for 17 years.
All of that came flooding back this month. All because of a wooden cabinet that contained a record player and some long-ago records of a long-ago man. Consider that and tell me: Can you say definitively that things don’t have souls?
And then this final (for now) memory:
He never called the thing a hi-fi, which is a decidedly 1960s word. He, born in 1922, simply called it The Phonograph, a term whose era has passed. Now, in the era of the vinyl renaissance, we call them “turntables.”
Even now, nine years after his death, I can hear him saying the word “phonograph” in my head. He adored it. Which may explain why once, when a professor colleague in the 1970s asked him whether he felt pornography was a scourge on society, he offered — or so he told me — this response:
“I don’t know. I don’t even have a pornograph.”
THE LEFT-HANDED PORTION of the phonograph cabinet still contains many of his albums, which are too unsorted at the moment to consider their significance today. But I want to direct your attention, in the photograph above, to the lower left.
After we carried the stereo up into the living room and put it into place, I slid open the top-loading door of the cabinet to reveal the records. Then I saw, in that corner, what you can see too: a cassette (another example of media obsoletus that he loved) in its clear plastic case. On the label, it says three words: “ED ANTHONY — LECTURES.”
I have not listened to them yet, even though not too long ago I bought a cassette player so that I could listen to some of his old tapes. I just want to think about it all for a bit. I want to wait for a calm, quiet day — one that isn’t the anniversary of his death — and sit alone, or perhaps with my sons, and hear him talk again, hear him say something that I’ve never heard him say. New content from a dead man. No sadness. Only possibility.
Happy grief. Stuff he left behind, probably without even knowing he was leaving it behind. Conversations continuing, across the years, across the generations, even beyond the mortal coil. Voices gone silent, somehow amplified again.
In Latin, “Magnavox” means “mighty voice.” I think this stereo, which doesn’t even work any more in any conventional sense of the word, has proudly lived up to its name. It’s not even plugged in, but it seems to be working just fine. I can hear it now.
More by Ted Anthony:
Ted Anthony, a journalist based in Pittsburgh and New York, has reported from more than 25 countries. He is the author of Chasing the Rising Sun: The Journey of an American Song. He tweets here, Instagrams here and collects his writing here.
© 2024, Ted Anthony
