NO, REALLY, GOOD BYE. I MEAN IT.

By MICHAEL PERKINS

MY FATHER USED TO DEFINE “OLD SCHOOL” ENTERTAINERS by how many bows or encores they took at the end of a given performance. The vaudeville-era concept of a “curtain call” was illustrative both of the showman’s natural inclination to stick around, drinking in a little more applause, and the audience’s reluctance to let those wonderful pied pipers get away, abandoning us to our regular humdrum lives. There’s something in those feelings that speaks to a need for photographs, and photographers.

A year ago this month, Marian and I closed the book on over twenty years in the same house, as well as its accumulated baggage and bloat. Estate sales were staged. Decades of memories were sifted, often jettisoned at a speed that astounded both of us. And most importantly, some key objects were committed to photos. Children’s art projects; historic front pages; and, in a kind of “Rosebud” moment, one more “curtain call” for a life I left half a century ago, symbolized by a curio that had been dragged with me from house to house since my salad days; an inoperable radio from the 1930’s.

The Philco Junior cathedral model shown here was already an antique in 1972, when my best friend at the time toiled at great length to refurbish it as a wedding present for me. The vacuum-tube guts of the thing had proven beyond repair, and so he had replaced the workings with a transistor-based tuner of his own design, then provided power to the front-mounted tuning “spook light” with alligator clips and a Ray-O-Vac lantern battery. Fortunately, the cloth speaker grille was intact, as was the tortoise shell trim and two-tone face plate. And so, to the naked eye, the Philco was still in good working order, occupying an honored place in the first apartment I and my young bride moved into after our budget nuptials.

ntiquesBy the time I snapped one more image of the front of the radio, just ahead of our leaving for California, the back had rotted away, the sides were splintered, and it hadn’t received a broadcast in over a generation. Moreover, that first marriage had long since vanished beneath the waves, as, sadly, had the friendship that sparked the initial radio project. In the spirit of Bogie’s “we’ll always have Paris”, I guess I can say that, in this image at least, I’ll always have the Philco. One more curtain call before we sign off for the evening, ladies and gentlemen, and be sure to tune in again tomorrow for…..