The Jumping Turntable

For the first forty or so years of my life the turntable has been my primary source of music. I collected a lot of vinyl LPs. Sure, I listened to the radio a lot as a teenager and carried that transistor everywhere but that to find more stuff to play on my record player.

The ongoing problem with a record player was somehow making it jump or shake which caused the needle to skip across the record. The biggest cause of that was dancing. Another big cause was kids running across the floor.

We had a record player in our basement rec room growing up on Greene Street. We would have teenage parties down there with lots of dancing to a stack of 45's on the turntable. We learned to put a coin on the needle cartridge to keep the player from skipping to the dancing.

Later in the 70's in our house on Seymour Street we also had a problem with the records skipping because of dancing. We eventually built a shelf above the stereo system that was attached directly to the wall and held the turntable. That kept it from jumping around at parties which we had a lot of during those years.

Later on in the 1980's the cause of the jumping turntable was the patter of little feat. Suddenly we had a toddler running around that really had an impact on our record playing. When Katie was about three and a half years old we bought our first CD player. That was the beginning of solving the problem but it would take many years because we still had hundreds of LPs in our living room next to the turntable and CD player.

When our second child came along the jumping turntable problem became more acute because now the kids were running around together creating havoc with our record playing. I was also playing a lot of cassette tapes at this time to try and get round the turntable problem. We were also just buying CDs now and not getting any more LPs. 

In 1997 we moved to our new house on Crescent Ave and at that time the turntable was located in the front foyer away from the living room. The kids were also older now and not running around although Sean was eight and still throwing himself about the room while playing. Several years later I moved the turntable and the vinyl records up to my office and music room on the third floor where it still is today.

I have continued to play records up there on occasion and I have been thinking about moving the turntable back downstairs for a final last few years playing my old records one more time before getting rid of them. The kids don't want them so I will probably take them over to one of the used record stores after my last spin.