The Pumamouse Website: Pumamouse Pieces Of The Puzzle: The George Jennings Expedition

Welcome to "The George Jennings Expedition" webpage of
The Pumamouse Website!

South African Old-Time Radio
Pumamouse Pieces Of The Puzzle
The George Jennings Expedition

The Pumamouse Website Presents...

This webpage has been created with deepest gratitude to a little known
hero of South African OTR preservation...an American gentleman named George Jennings.

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Mr. Jennings, and to learn the details of his expedition to South Africa, which occurred thirty years ago. Had it not been for that journey, several of the Springbok Radio recordings which still exist today would not have survived.

Mr. Jennings was kind enough to allow me to record our telephone interview, so that I could transcribe our conversation and compose an accurate account of his memories. But first, I feel I should provide some background information for those website visitors who might never have heard of the gentleman. George Jennings is an American radio personality, and one of the original pioneers of USA OTR preservation. He is also the man who gave Ted Davenport (an American OTR dealer to whom I often refer as "The High-Mucky Muck Of USA OTR") his start in collecting and preserving USA OTR. So what do these two Americans have to do with South African OTR? There are many pieces to the puzzle of South African OTR preservation, so if you have not done so already, please read my essay entitled "The Truth About The Mother Lode" as an introduction to this webpage!

Having mentioned Ted Davenport, I must add my thanks to him for introducing me to George Jennings, thereby enabling me to get the facts straight from the source. Thanks Ted!

And now, dear guest, I hope that you will enjoy reading the following account as much as I enjoyed hearing George Jennings' recollections.

The Pumamouse
(MaryAnne)
April 2003

PUMAMOUSE PIECES OF THE PUZZLE LINKS:
THE GEORGE JENNINGS EXPEDITION
Interview by MaryAnne (The Pumamouse)
copyright 2003

M: I'd love to know all about you, all about why you went to South Africa, how you went there, and the whole story, if you would tell me.

G: This is a long, involved story. First of all, I'm a broadcaster. At the time all of this happened I was Operations Manager of a 50,000 Watt station in Little Rock, Arkansas, and I had been collecting old-time radio since about 1959. About 1969, South African shows started showing up in trade stuff from Jim Blythe. I believe he was the only one who was getting them at the time, and I got curious about it, and just on a whim, in 1973, I did probably one of the stupidest things in my life…my partner and I got on a plane and flew to South Africa, to Springbok Radio, with the idea that the shows were of such quality that they could be syndicated in this country. We did some phone calls with them, and then we went down there and spent about two weeks, toured SABC and Springbok Radio, drove around the country a little bit, and went to some of the studios where they were recording the programs.

There was a guy from Rhodesia there who had heard about us coming down there, and he flew us to Salisbury on his plane because he was producing radio programs in Rhodesia and was interested in syndicating them, and we spent about three or four days in Rhodesia, and then came back to South Africa.

During the period of time we were in South Africa we went all around the city, and at the time they were building the television station, it was not built because it did not go on the air until 1976. We got a lot of cooperation from the South Africans and so forth, but when we came back to the United States, we just weren't able to market it. It just didn't turn out to be a market for those kind of radio programs, and so eventually we dropped it.

M: Do you recall the name of the man from Rhodesia?

G: Yes, I can recall it very easily because a year later he came to the United States and visited with us in Little Rock. His name was Andy Smith, and the guy at the SABC that I did the most dealing with was a guy named Ben Swart, at Springbok.

M: Did you also tour Durban?

G: No, we didn't have time for that because we got involved in that Rhodesian thing, about all we did was go to Pretoria, and go around in the countryside. Johannesburg itself is a massive, massive city. It seems as big as New York, and we spent most of our time in Johannesburg.

Being in broadcasting myself, it was interesting to see, because the structure of the way Springbok produced their programs was different than I thought it was. Obviously, they had their own studios, but about 99% of the programs that were produced were contracted out to small recording studios all around Johannesburg. There would be like one recording studio "A" got a contract to produce this program which was a drama and that program which was a comedy, then recording studio "B" got a contract to produce this, that, and the other. And then there were a pool of actors that went from studio to studio, and then it was all delivered on tape to Springbok Radio. It wasn't really done on premises as much as it was in the United States, where NBC had their own complex and that kind of thing.

M: If it hadn't been for the fact that you went there (South Africa) and did what you did, the programs never would have gotten here, Ted (Davenport) never would have gotten them, I never would have gotten them from Ted, and I never could have sent them back to there (South Africa).

G: My partner, a guy named Alan Sutton, flew with me to South Africa. We had sort of a hairy flight over there. We flew over on South African Airways, and I don't know if you are aware of it, but the South Africans are crazy about wine. They're almost as bad about wine as the French are. And, they were serving wine on this flight, and we were over the Atlantic, about halfway to Africa, when the plane dropped about 4000 feet, we hit an air pocket and dropped about 4000 feet, and everybody was covered with wine. There was a woman in the back screaming, "We're all going to die! We're all going to die!", and all that kind of thing, but it did eventually turn into a fairly nice flight after that.

G: The studios were pretty well equipped and up to date at the time. In fact, while I was down there, one of the advertising agencies was doing a campaign for Lucky Strike cigarettes, "the American cigarette", so they had me cut a commercial, since I was an announcer myself, and that ran on Springbok Radio for "Lucky Strike American cigarettes".

G: The people were real nice. I drove around, in fact, I got lost and wound up in Soweto at one point, which I really wasn't too happy about.

M: When I began finding and returning SA OTR to SA, Ted was the only dealer who told me the truth about you.

G: Well, he was the only one who knew. Actually, there were people in Little Rock who knew, but he was the only – well, let me back up a minute.

When I was working at this 50,000 Watt station (KAAY), I was doing morning drive. It was a rock station, and we ran a thing called "Breakfast Serial". What it was, we would take things like "The Inner Sanctum" and cut them into three-minute segments and run them daily, and then do a little narration around them. It would be a serial that ran at 7:45AM every morning. Ted got wind of the fact that I was into old-time radio, so he contacted me, and I started lending him reels, and he started dubbing the reels, and that's how he got into this thing. That must have been '71 or something like that.

M: You said that Jim Blythe was getting things from South Africa before you went?

G: Yes, he was. In fact, he was the first one who showed up with South African material. You see, the way it all started, when I started in '59, there weren't any collectors of old-time radio. But, by 1966 or '67, there were eight or nine of us. What you could do was, you could dump your copy, equalize it and compress it and make it as best you could, and then send on the master reel to the next person, and it would be bicycled around to about eight people. Blythe was one of them, and then he started throwing in South African shows that he was getting, and that's what got me interested, because I had no idea that the programs existed in South Africa. One day I just decided, well what the hell, we're going to do this, and Alan and I got on a plane and we went to South Africa, and spent a couple of weeks just tooling around and so forth. But, we didn't get down to Durban and the other place (Cape Town), we had too much fun at Springbok (Johannesburg) with all of those people.

M: Was Alan Sutton also at the Little Rock radio station with you?

G: No, he was a contractor. At the time, in 1971, I started a company called "The Electric Memory" which was putting old-time radio shows on cassette, and then eventually we went to 8-track carts. We got a contract with Stuckies to put old-time radio shows in their stores, and got Columbia House to duplicate the old-time radio shows, and we had them on the Interstates (highways) all over the country. That went on for about three or four years, until we got into another business. Alan was a partner of mine in "The Electric Memory" thing.

M: Radio was still going strong in South Africa, even after television was introduced there. Springbok Radio stayed on the air until 1985. Does that surprise you?

G: Not really, because the same thing happened in the United States. American radio didn't go off the air until 1962, which puts it off the air about twelve to thirteen years after television came in to this country, and you figure the same thing for Springbok and television there, then lag time is about the same.

Today, in this country, it's not a profitable thing to do, so that's the situation, and I assume it's the same situation in South Africa now with television.

M: As you probably recall, there were three SABC radio stations, Springbok Radio, which was the commercial station (on which both English and Afrikaans were spoken), the "A" Programme, which was the English Radio Service (on which only English was spoken), and the "B" Programme, which was the Afrikaans Radio Service (on which only Afrikaans was spoken).

G: There is an interesting parallel. San Antonio (Texas) is almost 60% Hispanic, and there is an interesting thing going on now in radio in this country, in parts of this country where there is a large Hispanic population. You are getting into second and third generation Hispanic, who are totally bilingual, they speak Spanish with no accent and they speak English with no accent. The number one radio station in San Antonio is a station where the disc jockeys and the announcers will deliver a weather forecast in Spanish, and then shift into English to do a commercial, and then shift into Spanish to do another line or two, and then shift into English. I was trying to explain to Ted, that's what they were doing down in South Africa (on Springbok Radio) because they would shift from Afrikaans to English without any problem.

M: I can't tell you how many people have wrongfully claimed that they had the original reels from South Africa.

G: Well, remember that Jim Blythe was actually the first one, as far as I could tell. There may have been other people, because I was on a "round robin" (trading circle) with about eight or nine other people, I can not remember if there were other people who came up with them too, but I know that Jim was the first one who had any initially of the programs. And, when we came back, we brought a bunch of them back.

M: The things you brought back are very easy to distinguish. You can hear if it came from a master reel or not.

G: I really can't remember exactly what we brought back. I know we had some because we had to put together demos for the syndication idea.

M: Who did you approach in this country for the syndication?

G: Oh, we ran adds in Broadcasting Magazine, and we contacted a lot of people. The problem was that it was associated with old-time radio, which was drama and comedy and everything, and at that time, we were just shifting into FM and into the dominance of music and everything else, and people associated that with reverting to an old-time type of radio, which they just weren't interested in investing in.

M: You said that you were broadcasting music at that time in Little Rock.

G: Yes, it was a typical rock station. It was like any typical rock station of the late 60's, the same stuff you will still hear today on all the stations that are playing the music from the 60's.

M: What did you think of the professionalism of the shows in South Africa?

G: I thought they were as good as American or I never would have done that. Plus, the South African accent, as far as I could tell, was a pleasanter accent than the Australian accent, and I figured that it would not be a problem, because it was not difficult, and it was something that was not that obvious, and I didn't think that would be a difficulty in the situation. I don't think that was a factor in us failing, I think we were just at the wrong place at the wrong time.

M: I have heard rumors that one of the problems in the syndication of South African shows in the USA involved SAMRO (South African Music Rights Organization). I heard that there were some deals which fell through when it got right down to the wire, because they wanted more in royalties for the background music and the incidental music in the productions, which made it too expensive, to the point where some American companies didn't want to do it. Is there any truth in that?

G: I don't really remember, but I know there were some indications that there might be problems. Since we never really got on the air, we never ran into the problem, but it could very well have been, I just can't remember.

M: I must tell you, you do not realize the impact you had on South African OTR preservation. An hour of SA OTR currently airs in Johannesburg each week, called "Vintage Radio", on Radio Today 1485AM. There are South Africans listening every Thursday night to programs that you saved thirty years ago.

G: Another thing I remember, and I think I'm right in this, I may be wrong. One of the things that was interesting me, a government run radio operation is totally different than in this country. When we were down there, the year before, as I recall, they had signed off all of their AM stations, and they were strictly FM. They just made a decision that FM was superior to AM, so they signed off the AM's and turned everything to FM, which amazed me because of the very gall of doing something like that.

M: Regarding the timelessness of old-time radio and its current revival in South Africa with the Vintage Radio program on Radio Today 1485AM…

G: I was trying to explain old-time radio to somebody. When you hear a car sound effect go by in an old-time radio show, a teenager would be hearing a 2003 Lexus, not a 1947 Plymouth. Inside your head, you hear what's relevant. It's not like a movie where you actually have a picture of a '47 Plymouth.

M: When you look at the photos on The Pumamouse Website of Old Broadcast House in Johannesburg, you probably remember being there.

G: Yes, I remember it all, and we toured all over the city. Again, Johannesburg is this gigantic, compressing city. It felt like you were in New York City, in the middle of Fifth Avenue. It's an unbelievable place, and of course, that was thirty years ago, I'm sure it's a lot bigger now. And then, we flew by Piper Cub to Rhodesia, which was an interesting experience, too. We flew over Victoria Falls, and it was a heck of a deal.

M: Do you remember the names of any of the actors or the producers that you met at Springbok Radio?

G: No, I'm sorry, but it has been thirty years. The only name that I remember is Ben (Swart), because he was the Operations Manager of Springbok, and he was appointed by head of the SABC to take us around and show us everything. As far as any other names, after we failed on syndicating, I went back to collecting old radio shows and basically just put it out of my mind.

M: What was the show or shows that inspired you most to go there and say, hey, this one is worth going and finding out about?

G: Oh, I don't remember, I'm sorry, I really wish I could tell you, but there were so many of them, and they were the ones that Blythe was getting, so if you've got the titles that Blythe got, you know what ones were of interest to me.

M: Please tell me of your journey to Rhodesia. There was a person there who was also interested in syndicating?

G: There was this guy named Andy Smith, he was a friend of all the people at Springbok, and he had heard that we were coming in. So, we came down, and we talked to all of the people at Springbok, and then Andy says, "Well, why don't you come up to Rhodesia? We produce radio shows in Rhodesia, too." And so, the first thing we did, we didn't fly up there in the Piper Cub, we actually got us on Air Rhodesia and we flew to Salisbury, and he took us over to the radio studios there, which was really bizarre because they had guards with machine guns there. We went through their facilities and listened to some of his shows. And then, he was a pilot, and he had a Piper Cub, and it was really a bizarre situation, because you could fly over Rhodesia and look down and see the elephants with the cow birds, and all of that kind of thing, and then we flew over Victoria Falls. But, he was interested in it, and then seven or eight months later, we got a letter from him saying he was coming to the United States to see us. So, he came to the United States, and we were in Arkansas at the time, but we got in our cars and drove down to Texas and took him to Dallas, and showed him where Kennedy got shot, and drove down I35 and showed him Texas. South Africans and Rhodesians, well it's different now with Rhodesians, but South Africans identify with Texas. They are very much into the same kind of lifestyle.

We never did anything with Rhodesian radio. It was interesting, they had one television station, and they were running black and white films from the United States. I remember turning it on and there would be "I Love Lucy" and all of that kind of stuff.

M: What has been archived of Springbok Radio is mainly what you saved and what individuals have saved. I think they used to do this in this country also, but they used to take the reels and reuse them, so that a lot of the shows, once they were aired, the reels got recycled.

G: Oh, sure. Well, there was no reason at the time to think that they were of value. You've got to understand that. I mean, that was before the era of reruns. Now, when they produce a program, they would never think of erasing it because they have rerun value, but in an era when there was no such thing as a rerun, it was more valuable as a blank reel of tape to record over it. And, that was true of a lot of American programs, too.

Of course, you've got to back up in this situation because, in the United States, the reason that a lot of old-time radio shows are preserved in this country is because they occurred before tape technology existed. For instance, you had programs produced in the east coast that had to be delayed to go into the west coast so they could air them in California at the same time. So what they did was, they would do the program live in New York, feed it to Los Angeles, and then put it on a big electrical transcription disc, which was an aluminum based record, and then that was played at the appropriate time in California. A lot of those discs got saved, and that's where most of these programs are coming from. Later on, when tape technology came in, which was about 1949, you had a period in time when a lot of the stuff got erased, but by then there was some archiving going on with tapes, too. But, the discs were the ones that were saved and they were saved strictly because of the time shifting of the networks, in order to get it into the California time.

M: In South Africa, many of the discs wound up being sold by the pound by the production houses and used as a bonding agent to build their roads.

G: Well, the discs wound up as a lot of things because the engineers at the radio stations could boil the vinyl off of those things and they became aluminum, and you could make radio parts and anything else out of them. So, they cannibalized those, but it's just amazing the number that still exist here because people have managed to find them.

I was working at a station in Dallas in 1959. The station had been there since 1920, and I went up in the attic, and I found a whole pile of electrical transcriptions of programs from the 30's that had just been up there for storage and had been forgotten over the decades.

What's amazing is that so much of it is still out there. (Ted) Davenport has got this massive amount of stuff. I don't know how he managed to get it all over the years. Like I said, I started him thirty years ago, but I had no idea that he was going to take it to this extreme.

I understand how it all got saved. For instance, I had a friend by the name of Hugh Carlson, who worked at WTMJ in Milwaukee (Wisconsin). I had turned him on to old-time radio in 1965, and he went to Johnson's Wax, which was in Racine, Wisconsin. He went down into their basement and found all of the old "Fibber McGee And Molly" shows, every single one ever broadcast. They let him borrow them and transcribe them. That's where the massive amount of "Fibber McGee And Molly" came from. That's sort of the story of all of these things, there were individuals who come up with stuff, and of course because you can trade them, they become more widely disseminated.

It's not like anything else because, if you've got a master tape, and you know how to reproduce, and you know how to equalize and compress - this was before digital – but you could come up with an analog tape that was almost as good as the original.

M: What do you think of what's happening now with computers and .mp3's?

G: I think it's interesting. I think the .mp3's degenerate the sound to some degree, but I don't know what's going to happen because the computer is moving so fast that it is unbelievable. I think if .mp3's help them save the stuff and save it in smaller format, maybe that's a good thing, as long as they don't go down to the really compressed .mp3.

M: When I started, a lot of times the only way I could find any of the South African shows was in .mp3 format, so that's what I would get. And then, when I finally found Ted, and I finally found analog recordings of it, listening to the same exact episode, side by side, I was blown away by how it is supposed to sound.

G: Yes.

M: What was your favorite American series?

G: My favorite program was one called "Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar". It was poetic in nature in the way it was written, and it was acted extremely well, and it went on for something like fifteen years, and it's just really a fantastic program. And then, I loved "Suspense" and programs like that, but "Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar" is my favorite show of all, and then of course "X Minus One", have you ever heard that?

M: Oh, yes. Nowadays, it is possible to amass a large collection of American shows in a very short time. I remember Ted telling me that, when he started out, his big goal was to have more than 10,000 shows. I was able to accumulate that many American shows in just six months while I was searching for South African material.

G: I look back on my South African experiences as really interesting and a lot of fun, but I look back on them now, and it's probably one of the stupidest things I ever did because, you look at it in reality, and how many people do you know, on a whim, jump on a plane and travel halfway around the world?

M: I am a firm believer that all things in life happen for a reason. And, I can tell you, I thank God you did that whim. It may not have been the best thing for you, but it was certainly the best thing for South African OTR preservation.

G: Well, if they are using some of the shows now, that's fine, but again, you have to give Jim Blythe more credit than anyone else, because had it not been for the shows that showed up in the "round robin", I never would have even known that they were doing them. Jim Blythe had the original contact with the guy who was getting them from South Africa.

M: I believe that man's name was Fuller Horton?

G: Yes.

M: There is an essay on The Pumamouse Website, entitled "The Truth About The Mother Lode", based upon the information I received from Ted and Jim, in which I explain that connection.

G: The way it worked, in 1967 and '69 and so forth, by the time we hit there, we each had something like eight people who we corresponded with. They wouldn't necessarily be the same ones. Blythe would have eight, and I would be on his list, and I'd have maybe eight, and then there would be somebody else who maybe had eight. So, maybe all together there were 50 of us doing it at the time. And those tapes, I don't know if you are familiar with a program called "Lum And Abner"?

M: Oh, yes.

G: I came across what I would call "The Mother Lode" of "Lum And Abner" programs when I was living in Arkansas and Chet Lauck, who had long released his file of transcriptions which went on to be syndicated and so forth. It's just like Hugh Carlson got "Fibber McGee And Molly", and I got "Lum And Abner". I got something like two thousand episodes in a row. And, if you wound up in a situation like that, where you were lucky enough to come across something, that became almost like cash, because you had this thing that you could trade to people. I was getting maybe ten episodes a week, and I would send them out on a "round robin" tape that would go to maybe fifteen people, and they would copy them off, and that's where the "Lum And Abner's" came from.

Like I said, I started collecting in 1959, recording some old "Bob And Ray" shows off the air. By the time we hit 1960 and '61, I was recording "Johnny Dollar" and "Suspense". At the time, my father was Chief Engineer of a station in Dallas, and I had professional equipment, and I was recording "Johnny Dollar" and "Suspense" off of an FM station, which gave you pretty good quality. And, some of those are syndicating. But, what Ted did, in 1971 when he contacted me, he would just come to my house and grab a load of tapes, and take them home and duplicate them, and get started in everything. And, I had no idea that he was still doing it until I happened to run across his name on the net.

M: Finding Ted for me was a blessing. When you are starting out collecting nowadays, if you take one wrong turn, due to misinformation, you can find yourself down an alley. Thirty years ago, collecting OTR was a gentleman's sport, but today it has become a business.

G: In the old days, there was just a whole bunch of us, we were all friends, and if I got something, I'd send you a note and say, "Hey look, I've got this great stuff," and we'd trade it back and forth.

M: What are you doing now, since you have retired from broadcasting after your 40 year career?

G: There are radio stations that operate on sub-carriers around the country that read the newspapers and magazines for the visually impaired. I do a lot on one that's here, and I do a lot of work with the visually impaired. But also, a partner of mine and I got a contract with the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, which is a gigantic research facility. We have a contract to produce CD's on health topics, like Diabetes, Alzheimer's Disease. They've got 700 scientists there, working on things, and we are doing interviews with them on the latest developments, and putting them on CD. We are looking at marketing them through seniors' centers and things like that to people who are interested in health problems.

M: When you look back at your broadcasting career, was there a certain broadcast that you wish you could just replay over and over again?

G: Well, I was there in the police station when Oswald was there. You see those old black and white films of Lee Harvey Oswald being hauled back and forth in the Dallas Police Department? In that crowd of reporters yelling, "Why did you shoot the President, Mr. Oswald?!", I was there. That was the biggest thing that I've ever been in, and that's something that you don't forget. But, I'll tell you, at the time, it was bizarre because there was no security or no anything, anybody could walk into the police station at the time, as Ruby did, too, the next day, when Oswald was being questioned. That was one of the interesting things. And, that was what really got me, because that was what Andy (Smith) wanted to see most over here when he got here, was Dealey Plaza and where Kennedy was shot.

M: It is amazing how many people remember Springbok Radio so fondly and still grieve for its loss as if it were a member of the family who died.

G: You see, in my case it was sort of a different situation because my father was Chief Engineer of the CBS outlet in Dallas, KRLD, AM and FM, and I grew up with it. These days, Chief Engineers of radio stations have beepers and automatic systems and everything else that tells them when transmitters go down and things like that. He used to have to listen to KRLD all the time when he was at home. It was on in my home all the time, so I was exposed. And, when I was six and seven years old, whereas other kids would be out playing, I would be home listening to "Mr. Keen, Tracer Of Lost Persons". So, I grew up with it drilled into my head. I'm probably one of the last generation that remembers a lot of those during the 40's, because at that time I was just in my infancy.

M: So, you knew very early on that you wanted to be in broadcasting.

G: Yes. My brother took the engineering route and runs a computer software firm. He wrote a program called "Windows On Wall Street", which is for investments, and he's got a company in Dallas. He took the engineering side of it, and I became involved in the announcing side of it. After the station in Little Rock, I spent twenty years here at a station called WOAI, which is owned by a company called Clear Channel Communications, which is the largest radio broadcaster in the country. It's a news talk station, so there was a lot more to say on this station than there was on the rock station.

M: What do you think of Internet broadcasting?

G: I don't think anything of it. I think it's childish. I'm talking about the thirty year olds who sit there and play their own records on the Internet and call it a radio station. I haven't listened to any of the stations, but the reality of it is, so what are they doing? Broadcasting is broadcasting, and it's real, and it's there, and it's a business to make money. What you're doing is a different thing, you're like the museum operators who operate the museums who have the Van Goghs and the Mona Lisa. You're trying to collect and carry on with the tradition of something. But these people that broadcast on Internet radio, what do they think they're doing? I mean, what's the point of what they're doing?

M: It does seem like they are just putting on their own little show.

G: Yes, that's exactly it.

M: But, what I do think is interesting is the real radio stations that have broadcast capability via the Internet.

G: Oh, well, that's a good deal. I enjoy that, and I listen to stations all around the world. It's just gotten to the point where there is more than you can believe, really.

M: When you speak of collecting and "round robins" thirty years ago, I have to stop and remember that this was all done before computers, and this had to be done through snail mail. How did everyone know what everyone else was doing, since it would take time to go back and forth? Nowadays, if somebody found a stack of "Lum And Abner" transcription discs, it would be all over the Internet in five minutes, and the whole world would know. Within the OTR community, you would go onto the Internet and post it on a billboard, and everyone would know. Back then, how did everyone know? Did you send out newsletters?

G: No, no, no. I had my group of eight or so people, and I might send them a note or I might call them up and say, "Hey, I found this great cache of "Lum And Abner's", and I'm going to disseminate them to you over the next two years." And then, as I got the discs, I would just put them on a reel and send them the best quality tape and the best quality sound I could get. I'd send them off to the first person in the "round robin", they would copy them and send them off to the second person, they would copy them and send them to the third person.

M: When you would find something like that and put it out there, how long did it take if you found something new before it became common and you could get it anywhere? Or was it that you never could just go and get it anywhere because there wasn't the computer?

G: No, you could not go get it anywhere. It would be in the hands of the people you had sent it to, plus the people they had sent it to. And there would be no such thing as this common sharing. There would be sharing with the people that you cared about. It was just sort of a gentleman's deal.

M: So, to a certain extent, it was a bit of a closed circle. It was like a club?

G: Oh, sure.

M: That has changed dramatically. It is so much easier to get now. The problem is finding the best quality. In my experience, Ted has the best quality available in the market today.

G: I could tell you more about my experiences at Springbok. I went out to their transmitter, I got a kick out of going to their Inn. They had a gigantic tower that they built in the middle of Johannesburg. It looks like the really tall tower in Seattle, but without a restaurant at the top. They were broadcasting their television from it. They were building it at the time and took me through it. I'd tell you more about that kind of stuff, but I'm going to have to think about it, because you've got to remember, it's been thirty years, and that's a long time.

You've got to realize, when I started collecting, I was like 19 or so. I was extremely young.

M: At that time, were most of the other people that were collecting it older than you?

G: At the time I started, there was nobody. In 1959 there was nobody until I ran into, in 1964 I believe it was, a college professor at the University of North Carolina by the name of Lawrence Sharp. The way it all happened was, he had been recording off the air too for maybe six or seven years, and he had some different stuff than me. So, he sent me what he had that was different, and I sent some stuff to him that was different. And then, he happened to know somebody else who had been recording some stuff that was different, so we traded with that person, and then it just sort of went from there, one person to another, until we got to around 1967 or '68, when probably each person had a nucleus of maybe seven or eight people that we were doing the trading with. But, we didn't have newsletters or fanzines, or anything like that. We just would send the stuff out, and we'd send it off third class mail, and it may get to them in a week or a week and a half, but it was a great deal because I knew that I could open up my mailbox everyday, or almost everyday, and there would be tapes in there from somebody that I wanted. All I wanted was the tapes, so I got them, and I copied them in the best form I could, and then I sent them off.

Again, give Jim Blythe great credit on the South African material, because had he not originally done it, I never would have gone there.

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