My early stuff

[AM Matt]

Back around 1971, my late mom bought me a Panasonic Panapet 70 AM ball light blue ball & chain AM radio. Back in early 1972, my late mom bought me a green General Electric mono record player at K-Mart in Saginaw, MI (which broke in late 1979)!! Here are pictures of those. Also the Sid & Marty Krofft NBC Saturday morning TV series "The Bugaloos" showed the dark red radio used in an episode in late 1970!!

 

[rockdoctor]

I do not remember my first record player but it was a form similar to the one you posted. My first radios of my own was two transistor radios given to me a Christmas presents back about 1967 or 1968. The first stereo that I bought was in 1974 from JC Penny. It was just a record player and no radio. In 1976 I bought a Panasonic stereo Rado and Turntable. I still have it and still use it as well. The transistor radios are long gone.

 

[Harry]

I go way back to the 50s, and my first record player was a dedicated 45 player from RCA Victor. They were promoting the 45 rpm format so they came out with a player that only played 45s. It was a changer model, so you could stack a bunch of 45s on the top of the spindle. As each one played, the system would reject and drop the next record down and start playing it.


The switch on the left would perform a manual eject to get to the next record in the stack. The round knob on the left was the volume control - and that's it! Sound came from the front grill with the speaker inside.

It was a tube unit as I recall, and would get pretty hot with long usage. As a child, a few times I fell asleep with it running and found that the record on the platter heated up enough to warp. That player didn't make it out of the 50s, so it never got to play a TjB record! Other players came and went over the years.

My earliest records were things like "Sh-Boom" by The Chords, "Istanbul, Not Constantinople" by The Four Lads, and "The Banana Boat Song" by The Tarriers.