One of the activities Mom enjoyed, especially during the winter months, was using our Webster wire recorder. It was one of the few luxuries that we owned. Dad had bought it with the proceeds from a football parlay that he won two years earlier, when he had correctly guessed the winners of all ten college games. The recorder was built into a case. When the lid was fastened, it looked a lot like a small suitcase. It had a handle to make it portable but it was so heavy that I was certain it had lead on the inside instead of tubes. As Dad put it, "It takes six men and a boy to lift it."

Looking at the machine, I saw almost as many dials, sockets and other gizmos as there were on the tube tester at Snider's Drug Store. The day he had brought it home, Dad saw how intrigued I was by this wonderful device and how much I wanted to play with it. True to form, he told me to keep my mitts off of it. If I couldn't touch it, at least I could gaze at it in awe.

I knew what several switches did. There was one switch that moved from a setting called LISTEN to one called RECORD. I knew what the VOLUME control did and I had a vague idea what the function of the TONE control was. There was a light bulb mounted on the machine that would illuminate if you had the volume control too high. The recorder also had a sign on it saying that it possessed "electronic memory." I figured that must have something to do with a knob that kept time as a spool was being recorded or played.

Mom loved to hide the recorder behind a chair and hook up the microphone. After carefully winding a blank spool around the back and onto the take-up reel, she would set it to record and then leave the room. She especially liked to do this when we had company. After an hour, she would tell everybody that the recorder had been on, rewind the spool, and play it back for all to enjoy.

For some strange reason, nobody objected to Mom's little trickery. Other than the obligatory "Everybody else sounds right, but that doesn't sound like me," nobody ever got annoyed that they had been recorded without their permission. I used to wonder if that was legal. I also wondered what would happen if, say, Aunt Edna would go to the bathroom and find out when the spool was replayed that somebody had said something unkind about her while she was gone. That never seemed to happen. Maybe that meant that the people we socialized with were nice. More than likely it meant that, after their first experience with the Webster, they were all on their toes.

One time last year, Mom and Dad took Toby for a walk and said that Ross, Gary and I could record something while they were gone and they would all listen to it when they returned. I was all set to say something into the microphone when Ross grabbed it out of my hand. He told Gary and me to watch the light bulb. When we were both focused on it, Ross turned the knob to the RECORD setting, put the microphone next to his butt and farted into it. The light went on and all of us started to laugh.

"Now it's my turn," said Gary. His effort was not as loud, although it lasted longer. When my turn came, I failed to perform. Ross and Gary looked at me with annoyance on their faces since I seemed to lack the ability to fart on command. Rather than lose my turn, though, I had the foresight to belch into the microphone instead. My volume was as good as theirs was and I could hold a belch much longer than their paltry attempts.

For the next few minutes, the wire recorder picked up our efforts. When Ross rewound the tape and played it back, it sounded like an endless loop.

Finally, Ross said that we had better record a real conversation before Mom and Dad got back from their walk or we would be in big trouble. He explained that, by starting the recorder over again, it would erase our noble experiment.

When Mom and Dad came back, we all listened to the recording. Mom couldn't get over the fact that we seemed to be laughing a lot over conversation that really wasn't that funny.

We were lucky that we didn't get caught. Ross had wound an extra loop of the wire around the spool. So, when we listened to it, we found that Ross' first fart had not been completely erased.

Dad said "I wonder what's wrong with the recorder. Before I heard the boys talking, it sounded like a fart."