Radio News Cassettes

In the early days of CHRS, there was a period of time when our ‘CHRS Journals’ were published as audio cassettes, called ‘The CHRS Radio News’ How cool! Paul Bourbin was quite involved with the process and production. For years the cassettes floated around and languished among CHRS’ ‘stuff. Now do to the fine efforts of Archivist Bob Rydzewski, who has been working with the Internet Archive, has had 16 cassettes digitized and posted on the IA. Yay! There are more of these early CHRS stories, and as they are found and become available, they will be posted also. If you have any of these please get them to us to add to the collection. And big thanks to Bob for getting these posted!

From Paul Bourbin:
Thank-you for digitizing those old CHRS Radio News tapes. I have worried about them surviving as the cassettes are getting old and the masters are lost. It brings back memories of when a small group of people worked hard to bring news and interesting information to our members. It was the only way we could communicate with our members until CHRS got on its feet again. I remember the work it took to assemble the material, edit and time the master, make the tapes and mail them. It was a lot of work and great fun. Now they will be available for anyone.

Bob Rydzewski Asks:
Paul, how did you make copies of the audio journals? Did you have to record the cassettes one at a time in real time? How many copies did you make?

From Paul:
The audio material was recorded onto ¼ inch reel-to-reel either from a microphone or transcription disc etc. The various pieces were edited by Gary Halverson into a ¼ inch master tape.  It was given to Bill Helander who timed it and set levels.  From that, a master cassette was made and sent to a professional tape duplicator. I would then go down to the duplicator in Palo Alto and get the cassettes.  I bought sheets of cassette labels from Radio Shack and printed them, affixed them to the cassettes and placed them in an envelope.  I then printed the membership list, and affixed the labels and stamps on the envelopes, and posted them.  I cannot remember exactly what we ordered, but I think it was about 300.  My dining room table was CHRS’S office.

Incidentally, for the first edition, I typed the cassette labels one at a time. I did not have the Commodore yet.

One of our members complained about the cassettes and said that they should be on a more vintage medium.  For the second edition, I recorded it on wire for him. That took care of it.

It was great fun.  Let me know if you have any questions.

Paul

 CLICK HERE FOR THE ‘CHRS RADIO NEWS’