Platters On Wheels

THE ARTICLE “RADIO HITS THE ROAD” (by Michael Lamm, Spring 2000) briefly touched on the passing use of record players in automobiles. The author mentions 45-rpm records being used with them; my recollection is of 16 2/3-rpm records and players. They were the diameter of 45s but held three selections per side rather than one. I believe the idea was to minimize the number of disks a driver had to try to control in an automobile. The author is certainly correct in describing the difficulties of dealing with these players on the road. The disks liked to slide all around the interior and would pick up scratches that made them unpleasant to the ears or even unusable. And they tended to be destroyed by warping in a hot car in the summer.

Whenever I watch my seventeenyear-old son juggle the CDs in and out of his car player, I’m grateful that his low tolerance for uncooperative mechanical devices is not being tried by a record player.

Armand V. Brandao
Taunton, Mass.