Episode 33, Introduction: "This Week is Our Thanksgiving Episode"

SPOKEN WORD WITH ELECTRONICS #33: A BAKED HAM DINNER (Thanksgiving Special) Hear Betty Crocker's "Cooking for the Blind" series from the 1950's, and prepare a Thanksgiving Dinner with canned food. Hi, everyone, welcome back to the show. This week is our first Thanksgiving Episode, and with most of us opting to stay home and not travel this year, I thought I'd share one of my favorite records in my collection. This is a 40 album set from The Minnesota Department of Public Welfare. Specifically this is a part of the "Talking Books for the Blind" – an endeavor that is still very much alive in public education. I have a friend who has read trigonometry into a recorder for use in math courses at the university level for decades, as an example. Betty Crocker's 1954 "Good and Easy Cookbook" was recorded, in full, for this series of vinyl. The fidelity is choppy, as these are flexidiscs with a loud noise floor. There's another issue, too: My copy, which might be the only complete surviving set, arrived to my home years back COVERED IN OIL AND BUTTER. I'm completely baking serious, here. This is 50-70 years of sludge from a set that got used. But I had no idea to prepare for this as the seller indicated the set of records as "looks in good condition" – So this episode I'll also discuss how to detoxify and clean up old records with vinegar, alcohol, and distilled water. I used my Vestax Handy Trax to do the recording, as I can easily swap out the needle. The Good and Easy Cookbook, Services for the Blind Edition, Minnesota Department of Public Welfare, ca. 1956. was an entire cookbook in a small stack of green flexidisc vinyl. Half of the stack are index records, where each recipe is read aloud with a 'page' number. The other discs are the 'pages' – So, a recipe on page 42 would be on the disc marked "P – 42". This is an awesome piece of accessibility history. For the discussion this week, I go through the records and show the futility and difficulty of actually USING them, however. You have to listen to each index fo