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.

The Great White Wonder

Here's Bob Dylan playing with The Band at the I.U. Assembly Hall on Feb. 3, 1974.

In honor of Dylan being the announced winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature this week, I dug out my copy of his 1969 bootleg album, The Great White Wonder, and digitized it.

It's a 2-LP collection of monaural tracks that, I'm surprised to note, is selling used for $167 on Amazon.com.

I uploaded my digitized collection of mp3 tracks to my Amazon Music library and am seriously considering putting the vinyl up for sale.

Back at it

I dug this 1964 Kinks album out of the stacks in the garage and also rescued my 1970s Discwasher setup.

I found a YouTube video that refreshed my memory on how to use the Discwasher and was happy to find it still had an ample supply of D4+ fluid with it.

This process gets a little easier with each album.

That is until Audacity locks up while I'm labeling tracks on the Blues Brothers "Briefcase Full of Blues" album.

Success!!!!

After more than a little trial-and-error, I succeeded this morning in editing this little-known classic Levon Helm album and getting it into iTunes and, from there, into my Amazon.com music library.

Helm's self-titled album was released on vinyl in 1978. A more recent CD version sells on Amazon.com for $38.99.

My vinyl copy came to The Indianapolis News as a review copy. I didn't appreciate it at the time and probably played it once before shelving it for 38 years, so it's in pristine condition and required virtually no cleanup in the editing process. The album features a stellar cast of musicians, starting with producer Donald "Duck" Dunn, Steve Cropper on guitar, Tom "Bones" Malone on trombone and Alan Rubin on trumpet - perhaps better known from the Blue Brothers movie.

The last tricky part was importing the tracks from iTunes to the Amazon Music Player library. Amazon wouldn't accept .wav files, so I had to go back to iTunes and make copies in the AAC format.

Wall, now I know how it's done, so onward!

Improvement

Nothing like a new stylus and cartridge to improve playback.

Those tiny screws and connections are a bit of a challenge for my big fingers and limited focus vision.

Change of plans

Until this week, I figured I'd be riding up to Potosi, Mo. this morning for the Falling Leaf Rally.

Instead, I'm waiting for the UPS truck and a stylus/cartridge combination for my Numark TTUSB turntable.

I chose to skip the rally because it appears all of my Indianapolis BMW Club friends have gone to Barber Motorsports Vintage Days in Birmingham, Ala.

The stylus/cartridge purchase was made on Wednesday when I discovered I wasn't getting both channels accurately when digitizing my vinyl albums. I pretty much ruled out bad settings in the Audacity software and narrowed it down to the stylus or cartridge. Just to be sure, I'm replacing both of them.

And, of course, the weather is perfect for the rally.

I can only hope that Barber Motorsports Park doesn't decided to make this a permanent second-weekend-in-October event.

More digitizing

Starting out this morning digitizing Reflections in a Crystal Wind by Richard and Mimi Fariña.

The album was released in 1965. Fariña's first and only novel, "Been Down So Long it Looks Like Up to Me," was published in April, 1966.

Two days after its publication, Richard was at a booksigning party at a Carmel, Calif., bookstore. A guest at the event was on a motorcycle and offered Richard a ride down Carmel Valley Road. The guy went into an S-curve at an estimated 90 mph and crashed. The rider lived but Richard was killed instantly. He is buried in Monterey.

Mimi, who died of neuroendocrine cancer at her home in California, on July 18, 2001, was a sister of Joan Baez.

Maria and I have ridden down that road at a more reasonable speed and survived.

I'm so glad I learned good record-handling habits

I just finished digitizing this album, which I've had since I was a junior in high school.

You would expect a 54-year-old vinyl record to have some scratches, clicks and pops, but my copy is amazingly clean. That, I guess, is a testament to the training in record handling I received from my band director, Rick Laughlin.

While my contemporaries thought nothing of clamping greasy fingers onto the grooves, I took special care to never touch the grooves lest oils from my skin capture dust. I always handled LPs by the edge and made a point of returning them to their jackets as soon as they came off of the turntable.

Consequently, my vinyl record collection is still worth digitizing.

Digitizing

I finally gave up trying to get the sound to work reliably on Maria's Dell laptop and abandoned my plans to digitize my vinyl albums in the living room.

So I cleared a space on the table next to my upstairs desktop computer yesterday, brought the Numark USB turntable up and fiddled with my free copy of Audacity recording software until I got it working to my satisfaction.

Then I went to work digitizing the first four albums - a couple of early Kate & Anna McGarrigle albums, the Blues Brothers "Briefcase Full of Blues" record and a two-record Jimmy Buffett concert album from 1978.

I'm just getting the albums into digital form for now and will go back and clean them up and separate out the individual tracks later.

It's fun hearing music I'd forgotten, some of which it turns out is quite forgettable.

Buckeyes on the way

A thoughtful Delphi, Ind. guy is sending me some freshly fallen buckeyes so that I can try to grow a buckeye tree or two. Or three.

Jim Huddleston, who once lived just up the road at Paragould, responded to my request for buckeyes that I posted on a Delphi nostalgia Facebook page.

Thanks, Jim!

Hoping to see friends in Potosi

I typically go to two BMW club rallies a year - the European Riders Rally in Burkesville, Ky., in May and the Falling Leaf Rally in Potosi, Mo. in October.

The main reason why I go to these is that several of my Indianapolis BMW Club friends usually show up.

I've been getting psyched up about the Falling Leaf Rally, set for next weekend, so I posted to the Indianapolis BMW Club Facebook page asking who's going to Potosi. It turns out that several folks are passing on Potosi and going to the Barber Motorsports Vintage Days next weekend in Birmingham, Ala.

Crap.

I remain hopeful that some of my Indy friends will go to Potosi.

Hedge apples, aka Osage Oranges

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I just had a flashback to the autumn of 1969 when I was a reporter for The Indianapolis News.

Another reporter was doing a series of profiles of wives of Indiana college presidents and I tagged along as a driver/photographer.

I have a vivid recollection of the day we went to visit Polly Seymour, wife of Wabash College President Thaddeus Seymour. She had a bowl of hedge apples decorating the bar in her kitchen. I suppose I should have been familiar with hedge apples, but they were new to me and made a lasting impression.

Buckeyes

Today's cool autumnal weather reminds me of autumn in Delphi, Ind. when I was a kid - specifically about time spent after school on the way home.

There was a large buckeye tree next to the Monroe Street entrance to the Delphi City Park on the city's eastside that bore its seeds/nuts around this time of the year. My friends and I would stop on our way home from school to fling sticks up into the branches and knock down as many buckeyes as we could before it was obviously time to head for home.

I used to collect a cigar box full of buckeyes every fall and just as regularly, my mother would throw them away.

I haven't seen a buckeye or a buckeye tree in years and, according to the map of the tree's range, I'm not likely to see any here in northeast Arkansas.

Interesting Volkswagen history

http://propagander2.tripod.com/index-6.html

Disconnected

I pulled the seat off of my 2003 BMW K1200GT this morning to secure a strap for the tank bag and discovered that somebody forgot to re-connect the cable for the heated seat when the guys at Grass Roots BMW Motorcycles put my bike back together last week.

No big deal. I easily found where to plug it in and it works fine now.

Dogs gone, dogs returned

I mowed the lawn yesterday afternoon, including the fenced section of the back yard where the dogs hang out.

This necessitates bringing the dogs into the house and putting them into their kennels so they are out of the way and so they don't bolt through the gate that I have to open to get the John Deere LA 125 lawn tractor in and out of the enclosed area.

Once I finished mowing, I parked the mower next to a hose spigot, attached the hose to the mower deck and activated the blades for two minutes to flush out whatever grass was stuck to the underside of the mower.

Then I turned off the water, disconnected the hose and parked the mower in the garage.

I let the dogs out into the yard and sat down with an iced tea to watch TV.

About an hour later, I thought I heard a voice in the back yard and saw Jack come onto the porch through the dog door and get a drink. Moments later, I noticed someone at the front door.

It was Tony Micenhamer, one of our neighbors, asking if I was OK. He said our dogs were out and the gate had been open. Yeah, I forgot to close and cable lock the gate before I let the dogs into the yard.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Tony said Jack showed up at his house, prompting him to come over and see if I had some kind of medical emergency.

With Jack secured in the back yard, we set out to search for Dora. Tony went south and I went north, up into the newer section of our small wooded subdivision. I went to the end of the road and turned around, scanning in all directions.

As I crested a rise, I looked over to my right toward the back of the house that sits across the cul-de-sac from our place and saw Dora standing inside the neighbors' fenced in-ground swimming pool area. I parked the car and walked to the pool with Dora's leash in hand. The gate was open, but Dora seemed stuck at the other end of the pool enclosure, apparently creeped out by the tarp covering the pool. She seemed glad to see me as I snapped the leash to her collar and led her to the car.

I thank God for protecting our dogs from my carelessness and making their recovery so quick and easy.

Our first Aussie, Pete, went walkabout a couple of times when we lived in Thorntown, Ind. and was gone for a few days each time, creating horrible anxiety. I'm very grateful that we were spared this time and am doubly grateful for Tony's alertness and help.

Another big adventure

We drove up to Cape Girardeau this morning to retrieve my 2003 K1200GT from Grass Roots BMW Motorcycles where they did a major clutch overhaul, new rear brake pads and replaced the exhaust system that had a broken header pipe. The cost was $2,492.96. Could have been worse. A new exhaust system costs $1,700 but one of the employees had a used one he let me have for $250.

Maria was following me home when she called my cell phone, Bluetooth linked to my Garmin Zumo GPS. I have no microphone for the setup, so all I can do is hear the caller in my in-ear monitors. Seems she had a flat tire and was on the berm about 4 miles behind me. I stopped under an overpass around the 44-mile marker on I-55 and called the USAC road service we pay for through Shell Oil Co. I doubled back and found her around the 48-mile marker. There was nothing more I could do, so I rode about 10 miles south to a rest area and checked in on her. The road service guy had arrived and was working on the tire change.

She told me to go on home and she'd be along as soon as the could. I got home a little after 3 p.m. and checked her whereabouts on my iPhone Friend Finder app, confirming that she was about a half-hour behind me.

Never a dull moment.

Why I hate going to Little Rock

Maria had a work-related conference to attend yesterday in Little Rock, so I served as chauffeur for the 294 round-trip miles.

I was reminded again how much I hate going to Little Rock. It's a 2:20 trip and the Little Rock interstate system is a freaking nightmare. I've driven and ridden through a lot of cities, and I can't think of any with a worse-engineered road network. We get caught up in traffic jam bottlenecks every time we go there, regardless of the time of day.

Adios Starbucks, Hola Cafe Bustelo

I bought a 10 ounce can of Cafe Bustelo yesterday at Kroger, noting that it's supposed to be an espresso grind and is about half the price of the Starbucks Espresso Roast beans I've been buying.

When I opened the can this morning, I was pleased to see it truly is a finely ground, espresso-grade coffee, meaning I can put the coffee grinder away.

And it tastes every bit as good as Starbucks, maybe better.

African Violets

I found myself thinking about my mother's African violets this morning.

I have no idea why.

African violets, aka Saintpaulia, come from Tanzania. They are a houseplant that likes indirect sunlight. They have thick, puffy leaves that I couldn't resist squeezing to death when I was a little kid, much to my mother's dismay.

Now, I wouldn't mind having some around to remember her by.