Family fun with the Recordio

By Bob Cudmore, Focus on History, Daily Gazette and Recorder

      In the late 1940s my family had a machine called the Recordio to make 78 rpm records for our own amusement.

We often sent these homemade records to my Aunt Winifred and Uncle Albert Gulloni who, with Albert’s daughter Sylvia, had moved to Inverness, Florida after World War II. The Gullonis sent us Recordio Discs they had recorded in return.

First sold in 1939 in variously priced models, the Wilcox-Gay Recordio enabled consumers to make their own records using a microphone or recording audio from an embedded AM radio.

My uncle Al had operated a radio and television repair shop in Scotia and moved south to advance his career in retail. My hunch is my parents got a deal on the Recordio from Uncle Al. It might even have been a gift.

There is a fair amount of information online about the Recordio, manufactured in Charlotte, Michigan. Youtube has examples of recordings made on this system, which one online audiophile described as “decent.” It’s reported online that Johnny Cash and Les Paul used these player-recorders at some points in their early careers.

Wilcox-Gay sold Recordio Discs or blank records in two sizes. You also could play commercially produced 78 rpm records on the machine’s turntable.

Unlike later cassette tape recorders, you couldn’t record over a Recordio Disc once you created it.

That was a problem in our case in that as a spoiled young child I was a show-off, fond of off-color words.

My father would say, “Bob, say Merry Christmas to Aunt Winnie and Uncle Al.” I would sometimes respond by saying, “Poop!”

In my defense I knew this would get a laugh at home from my aunts and sister, if not from my mother and father. We no doubt mailed the off-color Recordio Disc to Florida anyway, where my potty mouth likely got more chuckles.

One family picture shows my father Clarence holding a vase of flowers, standing and singing or talking into the Recordio microphone on a floor stand in our living room in our flat on Pulaski Street.

In this picture the Recordio itself is on a coffee table to my father’s right. The recording arm does not look like it is on the turntable. Maybe my father was practicing.

The picture was taken in 1949 or so as I was a toddler on the floor playing with my aunt, my father’s youngest sibling, Vera Cudmore. My sister, the real singer in the family, may have taken the picture.

My mother and my father’s oldest sister, Gladys Morrell, are sitting on a couch smiling, enjoying whatever father is doing.

The photo was taken before we had a television set and a large, handsome console radio, separate from the Recordio, has a place of honor along the Pulaski Street living room wall.

The Recordio made the move when our family relocated up the hill to a home of our own on Amsterdam’s Peter Lane in 1957. A few years after that Wilcox-Gay went out of business. At some point, unfortunately, our Recordio was discarded along with our Recordio Discs.

My friend Warren Garling, known as Chris Warren on the radio, has been interviewing veteran radio announcers for a podcast series about their careers. Several of them had technical skills and first got into radio by building their own home radio stations as teenagers.

I worked in radio for a half century or so but did not build a home radio station when I was a teenager.

But I did have the family Recordio which helped me practice my speaking skills when I was a child.

Bob Cudmore is a freelance writer.

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