My Santa Claus was not a loving enabler of greedy children; he was a wise and frugal old fart who knew more than I did about what I wanted for Christmas. My two favorite gifts of all time were hand-me-downs and I didn’t mind that at all.
Number one was a 16mm film projector. Number two was a Sears Silvertone portable record player. Mono of course.
Just as you can identify the real composer of a Lennon-McCartney song by its style and lyrics, I knew immediately that the projector was my father’s doing. He bought it at Modern Camera on the corner of Denison Avenue and West 98e Street.
That’s also where I found my first wife. For a few years of our young adult lives, we lived in an apartment above the store, which was owned by her family. It would also be my son’s first home. Isn’t life strange?
Here I am on Christmas morning, circa 1956, listening to one of my Little Golden records on my beloved, hand-me-down Sears Silvertone record player. Photo by Betty Oslin
The acting, the editing, the dialogue, the titles
My father noticed how much I loved movies and cartoons, I loved them passionately. I suspect that movies and cartoons were just superficial distractions for most children. I appreciated them on a much deeper level. I was fascinated by the artistic side, by what went into making it: the acting, the editing, the dialogue, even the titles.
My father bought the projector along with several reels of film: silent films and cartoons, which were on several small five-minute reels and a large twenty-minute reel.
After breakfast on Christmas Day, I dragged the projector and film canisters to my bedroom. My parents would not see or hear from me for another ten years.
I still remember the brand name: Excel. It was made of heavy brown sheet metal and used a car taillight bulb to project images. It was a silent projector, but it produced a sound that I found comforting: a metallic mantra of meshing gears and pulleys.
Onomatopoetically, that would translate into a rhythmic ‘lattice-lattice-lattice-lattice’.
The lamp would become very hot. I loved the smell of burning dust wafting from the slot openings on top of the projector. If the film slipped between the gears and got stuck behind the lens, I had to act quickly to get it rolling again. Otherwise the film would smolder and break and I would have to stick it back together with masking tape.
Irv Oslin
Silvertone hand-me-down complete with Little Golden records
The Silvertone record player was clearly from my mother’s side. Dad bought her a new one: a more luxurious model with two speakers and an automatic record changer. So she put horse stickers on the sides of her old portable record player and that became my Christmas present.
Strangely enough, I didn’t mind buying a hand-me-down record player for Christmas. But I was offended because my mother thought the cheap horse stickers would make me think it was a completely different horse.
I remember thinking, “Gosh, Mom, I may have fallen off a turnip truck, but that wasn’t yesterday.”
To compensate, she threw in a generous supply of Little Golden records with tantalizing titles like “Never Smile at a Crocodile” and “Tootles the Tugboat.” A few years later, my maternal grandmother gave me some of her old 78 rpm records – mostly jazz and blues. I don’t know what I enjoyed more: the music itself or the fact that Mom thought Grandma’s music was decadent.
I listened to Grandma’s records for hours and fell into noirish fantasies. I closed my eyes and imagined I was in a dingy, smoke-filled apartment above a storefront in a shady part of town. No different than the apartment we lived in.
I don’t know what happened to the projector and the record player. Maybe I left them in the attic of the apartment above the camera store. Which burned to the ground a few years ago.
I can imagine the perfect Hollywood ending to my two favorite Christmas presents: 1940s blues music, as flames consume the projector and record player in a cobweb-strewn attic. Roll credits.
This article originally appeared in Ashland Times Gazette: Used movie projector, Sears Silverton premium gifts from Santa