33 1/3 long playing vinyl phonograph records – what most people think of when they think of records – were invented in 1953, which is the year I was born. Like any technology, they took awhile to become the accepted standard, which meant that in our house and other houses you could still find wind-up 78 rpm phonographs or victrolas as they were called. My mother went to her grave calling anything that played music a victrola. Anyway, we had a wind-up victrola in the basement and it was dark wood with a lid that lifted up and stayed open by means of a special hinge and the turntable was covered with a thin piece of green felt. The sound came out of a cone-shaped metal horn and there was a felt ball about the size of a softball that you could move in and out of the horn to change the tone – if you pushed it all the way in, it muffled all the high frequencies and if you pulled it all the way out, it had the opposite effect. We had some instrumental music, popular dance tunes, and some classical music and some novelty songs like "McNamara’s Band," and "The Monkeys Have No Tails in Pago Pago" and "Chinatown, My Chinatown" which I played over and over. What I liked to do most was to put a record on the turntable and get it spinning with my finger until it was going really fast, then put the needle on it and listen as the song went from being ridiculously speeded up to slowing down to a growl. Then I would leave the needle on the record and start spinning it with my finger and listen as it the music and tempo got faster and it came up to pitch. I used to do this a lot, making the records slow down, speed up, fluctuate and so on. That and the hymn singing at church were the first forms of music I was ever directly involved with.