On Christmas morning 1969, when I was 11 years old, Santa Claus brought me a tape recorder.
This was before cassette tapes. It was a small, battery-powered reel-to-reel unit. Recording the human voice seemed like a godlike power. I sang “Sugar, Sugar” by the Archies into my tape recorder and played it back for my 6-year-old sister.
Interestingly, I remember that toy all these years later not so much for what it did on that Christmas morning but for what it did not do. Somehow, I accidentally depressed the “pause” button on the tape player – who knew about pausing tape? – which rendered the unit mysteriously inoperable.
After I had spent a few hours stewing, I remember my mother and father knocking on the door of my bedroom. They both walked in and sat on the opposite corners of my bed. My mother, who was holding the tape recorder in her lap, smiled and pushed the “play” button. Immediately, I heard her voice from the speaker: “Mark, I think we’ve fixed your tape recorder. Merry Christmas, son.”
I remember this small act of parental kindness because it was not an everyday event. My parents were loving, caring folks, but parenting in the 1960s was not nearly as preoccupying as it is today. Midcentury parents did not appear to feel responsible for the minute-to-minute happiness of their offspring. Put it this way, had my tape recorder malfunctioned on a random day in February, it would not have been considered a family emergency.