On a group someone posted a new Crosley crappy cassette player that he bought for his kitchen and someone else said: “you could take a car stereo, put it two speakers and that’s it”. And boom. A childhood memory I forgot I had was unlocked.

My father was a pretty complex person, with hobbies that were very alien from me. An electrician by trade, he also dabbled in electronics, but he also liked to fish. Like a lot. Almost all of our family trips were somewhere fishing, that’s where I learned to swim and drank my first beer. But I digress. Let’s go back to electronics.

At some point, my father decided that some sort of entertainment needs to exist in the kitchen, as it was pretty much the room where everyone in the house spend the most time during any given day. Because of the pretty poor financial situation of my family and general unavailability of stuff at the beginning of the 90s, my father decided that he would build something, as it was the customary balkan tradition using available parts. So using the remains of half of the case of a broken old Romanian Pacific radio, using an old speaker from a different broken radio, a 220V to 12V adaptor and a S 755T 144 “Lira” car radio made by Tehnoton Iasi back in the 1980s. It looked something similar to this, with the speaker at the top. Unfortunately, the unit has been lost to the sands of time, but I remember it fondly, as it used to provide the sound stage for all my childhood: radio-transmitted football matches over the weekend, the levels of the Danube water, or the early morning shows, before I went to school, on the main radio channel

I also have a memory stuck somewhere in the back of my head for about 30 years or so, when I broke a different radio unit that my had kept in storage, because I pushed all three of the band selection buttons and they got stuck. I was a pretty stupid kid, I know.

More info about the radio itself can be found on Pro Radio Antic - The Association of Radio Devices Collectors of Romania.

We also had this radio at some point in our family car, a white 1988 Dacia 1310 TLX. Because the program was fairly limited and the reception wasn’t great in some parts of the country, I remember I used to talk. A lot. A whole fucking lot. I used to listen to comedy cassettes of Vacanta Mare group and used to recite stuff I memorised from listening to them so much.

Time passes, we move on to better, more modern stuff, and we leave the old things behind us. And then we’re left with the memories. Of the road trips, of the fishing trips, of coming back home with a trunk full of watermelons.

And the most cherished memory is the one that I used to fit on the backseat, lay there and take a nap to get closer to home. Oh, the days.