50 for 50: 1982

YEAR: 1982

AGE: Turned 12 on Nov. 6

LOCATION: Chicago, Rascher Avenue

BULLS' RECORD: 34-48

SONGS I LIKED: "Pac-Man Fever" by Buckner and Garcia; "Africa" by Toto; "Abracadabra" by the Steve Miller Band

MOVIES I SAW: "E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial"; "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan"; "Tron"

TV SHOWS I WATCHED: "Silver Spoons"; "Voyagers!"

MUSIC VIDEOS I ENJOYED: "Centerfold" by the J. Geils Band; "Pressure" by Billy Joel

VIDEO GAMES I PLAYED: Donkey Kong (arcade), Megamania, Grand Prix

I've been writing this blog for 13 years, and a good chunk of my posts have been dedicated to nostalgia and reminiscing. So when I started considering what to write for 1982, I kept coming up with topics that I already have covered in the past.

Our family took our first real vacation in February 1982. I covered that trip extensively, starting with this post.

I could write about video games -- this year was the peak before the first crash -- but I did that yesterday.

How about how this was the last truly innocent summer of my life? Or my first paper route? Both covered.

I settled on a cassette tape.

A few months ago, I wrote about a wave of nostalgia in 1996 listening to a cassette of songs off the radio from 1984. I have more than 100 such radio tapes, and here's the story of the very first one.

Actually, I'm not quite sure why I started taping songs off the radio in the fall of 1982. I didn't own a Walkman or a boombox. Our family owned this white cassette/radio and a slightly larger black, not-quite-a-boombox GE radio, and I had maybe 10 prerecorded cassettes (let's hear it for the Columbia Record and Tape Club!) I'd listen to on those devices. I was listening to B96 and WLS a lot and, at some point, must have thought creating a tape of songs would be cool.

The TDK cassette you see picture became the receptacle of all this music I wanted to record. The case got lost along the way -- the insert you see was from a computer cassette case. The first song in my new collection, which spanned years of recording, was Joe Jackson's "Steppin' Out." I followed this protocol that the first song on the radio tape would be the title of that tape -- again, I don't know how I arrived at that since I was already numbering my cassettes, but it stuck into the 1990s.

A Tape 2 and Tape 3 once existed, but the cassettes were cheap, and once I got a dual cassette boombox (for Christmas in 1984), I had this great idea that I could consolidate my music so I had each song just once across all my tapes. I didn't realize then that the radio cassettes weren't just songs, but a snapshot of what that moment in time. The nostalgia wasn't so much about the songs themselves as the collection of songs on the tape, the DJ talking, the station IDs, and the commercials if I had forgotten to hit stop. I taped over parts of 2 and 3 from the subsequent winter, and eventually, the tapes didn't last ...

However, eventually I recognized the value in tapes 4 and 5 and took care to preserve them by copying them over to better cassettes. Not every tape survived over the decades -- and some just got lost -- but I completed a grand project in that I converted all my radio tapes to digital format. I can listen to my tapes on an iPod or my Mac, and if I figure out a way, I might be able to stream them.

This all started with Tape 1, 38 years ago. The collection of songs is a perfect snapshot of November 1982 (minus a few songs that were from earlier in the year). Taping songs from the radio (as well as mix tapes, now that I think about it) is likely lost to anyone born after 1990, and definitely anyone born this century -- why go through the trouble when you can stream songs whenever you want? I like the iPod/streaming/YouTube access to music, too, but sometimes, a decades-old cassette is where your soul needs to be.

That said, I promise now, if I'm stumped to write about something in 1989, I won't choose Tape 194 as a topic.