Editing the UAW Tapes; Night II

The photo above comes from the the volume From Lake Superior to Indiana: The Story of UAW Region 1-D. Published by the UAW in 1988. This photo was taken on October 28, 1972. If I am not mistaken, to the immediate left of the podium, a portable cassette recorder can be seen. I selected this photo because it is from the middle of the time period of the tapes (1969-1974) and also shows the kind of recording environment in which most of the tapes were produced. This photo appeared in the Region 1-D newsletter; it was taken at a dinner for a local union.

The photo above is me and my grandfather; it was almost certainly taken in 1975. The scene of the photo is not my grandparent's cottage on Lake Michigan, so I believe it was taken at their home in Grand Rapids. I look to be almost exactly Owen's current age (7); I turned 7 in April of 1975. My grandfather died in January of 1976.

Okay, gonna call it a night now. I am through June of 1970 at the Woodcock Rally in Grand Rapids. The formal events are easier to edit--you can hunt for the applause as section breaks, and it's easier when speakers change. That's 4 tapes down, and 7 to go. The remaining tapes are all formal programs. Hopefully that makes them easier.

It's remarkable how much more usable the recordings seem when broken into tracks. I am taking them into iTunes one by one, adding the image of the cassette they came from, and labeling the ID3 tags.

This will be a very useful collection when it's finished. The UAW really does have an amazing history.

Funny about my entry below: the point about the weak batteries really dawned on me as I was typing, and I just kept on typing. Kind of a cool artifact of a thought process. I think it probably is true--the logic makes sense, and I just can't imagine them using reel-to-reel decks to make these recordings as all the activities were going on.

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On the Brendan Sexton speeches at Black Lake in 1970 after Reuther's death now. This is pretty amazing stuff.

I've developed a good method for this. But it's not quick.

Issue: clearly many of these were transferred from reel-to-reel, as there are speed up issues. Wait a minute--not necessarily true. If a battery operated recorder was used, it may have just... wait a minute. Let's think that through:

Q. If the tape slowed down recording speed because of low batteries, would the tape played at normal speed sound too slow or too fast?

Here it is: I am digitizing these cassette recordings from the early 70s. Two of them speed up toward the end (i.e. the speech is faster and the vocies are higher in pitch). My initial thought was that they were transferred from reel-to-reel machines. Now I have a new theory, but I can't decide if it goes the wrong way. My new theory is this: the recordings were made with battery operated cassette recorders and the battery was running low. The tape traveled more slowly during recording, so at normal speed playback, the recorded program sounds faster. Does that make sense? (Or would it be the other way around?)

It's fairly clear that Sexton was somewhat annoyed that my grandfather was taping everything. Pretty funny.