Me an' my toys - JVC RC-M70 boom box

1980 - JVC RC M70 boom box

My love of music goes back as far as when I was born - I can still remember when Respect, Tighten Up, and I Heard It Through The Grapevine were brand new. I started to buy LPs in 1977, and after a while I had a decent collection. I also made cassette tapes from the radio and our stereo in the living room - either straight or by putting the recorder right up to the speaker! Radio started to move away from AM and over to stereo FM - I was listening to WBLS and WKTU (when it was known as "Disco 92" in 1979 - remember Paco the DJ?) heavily then, especially in the late 70s when Disco was king! The only problem with that scenario is that I couldn't listen to my stuff when I wanted to!

That was when a little visit to Crazy Eddies (yeah, I went there a lot - they were Best Buy's equivalent way back then!) changed all that. They let me check out JVC's monster "boom box" (although we just called it a "box" in my neighborhood) for 1980, the RC-M70! This thing had everything - AM, FM, and short wave, a cassette player/recorder with a music search feature (it would look for gaps between songs greater that 4 seconds, and it worked!), and inputs for an auxiliary source and a turntable! One little problem - this thing cost $300, and in 1980 dollars, that was a lot of dough!

The summer of 1980 was probably the worst I've ever had in life and 1980 in general was not good for me. I started to exhibit a stiff neck in March and it didn't get better. After many trips to the HIP clinic in Washington Heights, and no conclusive diagnosis, I had a biopsy done at Mt. Sinai hospital, and we found out what was wrong... I had cancer, and it was malignant. This meant chemo over the next two years and a major life hurdle that fortunately I was able to surmount, and to this day I am cancer free! I wanted to mention that my doctor, Michael Harris, told me something on that day (June 6th) that meant so much to me and drove me forward: "I want to be invited to your wedding." Almost 20 years later I was able to grant his wish!!

OK, back to the story at hand...

Layaway is your best friend if you want something, have no credit, and can drop a few dollars here and there on the item until you can buy it. I got a lot of sympathy that year from folks, and some monetary gifts, enough so that in December of 1980 I was able to buy the RC-M70 from Crazy Eddies in the Bronx (yep, same store!) for Christmas that year! This time, I didn't feel like going through the hassle I did with the Atari, so I had two friends come with me and help me home with it - needless to say we made it!

Heading into 1981 (a great year, BTW) I actually purchased a carry bag for that 20 pound monster that ate 10 D-cell batteries and used to take it around the neighborhood and to school (always on the bus!) to blast tunes. In March of 1981 I finally bought a Technics turntable that I hooked up to it so I could finally make better mixtapes of my LPs through a direct hookup. I used my JVC up until summer of 1983, when I took it to Antigua on vacation (a friend of mine had a cousin that lived there, and we stayed for three weeks!) and my friend plugged it in and turned it on BEFORE I could change the voltage setting on it! It blew the right speaker and rendered it practically unusable after that.