Eureka!

Delphi (Ind.) High School had a swing choir in the early 1960s called the Top Twenty because it was composed of the top 20 choral voices in the school.

I and many of my friends were members. We thought we were pretty good and apparently contest judges thought so too, because we won a lot of awards at NISBOVA (Northern Indiana School Band and Vocal Association) contests.

Sometime in 1962, an audio engineer from nearby Logansport recorded us and created a six-track monaural phonograph album.

I've wanted to find and digitize my copy ever since I acquired a Numark TTusb turntable from a friend, with the aim of sharing the files with my fellow Top Twenty alumni and alumnae (yes, I took two years of Latin in high school).

I've been searching through hundreds of LPs in crates and boxes in the garage where they've languished for the nine years we've been in Arkansas. I got serious this morning and moved the lawn tractor and generator out of the way to give me an unobstructed view of a couple of hard-to-reach crates and, wonder of wonders, I found it!

The sound quality is slightly better than horrible, given today's recording and playback technology yielding extremely low noise-to-sound ratios. But even so, it takes me back to a different time and place where we had no idea how innocent we were. Considering the engineer's equipment and skills set, it's an acceptable artifact from more than a half-century ago.