Recording More than Just Cats

It started with a Fisher-Price tape recorder in the 1980's, continued with a GE cassette recorder in the 1990's, and has culminated (at this point in the 21^st Century) with a Sony IC digital recorder.

I've been recording stuff for most of my life.

When it was a Fisher-Price tape recorder, I recorded random things. I mean, really random. I recorded bad attempts at playing the piano. I recorded the theme during the end credits to the TV show “The A-Team.” I once accidentally recorded someone’s flatulence. (That never stopped being funny.) I even “interviewed” our pets—our bobbed-tail cat, Bobbie, and our Springer Spaniel-Australian Shepherd mix dog, Bernie. I acted like they were answering coherently.

Parenthetically, I have to mention that I lived a mile outside of a town of 1,200 people. This was before we got a Nintendo Entertainment System. We didn't have a VCR yet. There was no such thing as the Internet or smartphones. We actually used our imaginations back in the 1980's. Dang kids today.

Many years after I forgot about the Fisher-Price tape recorder, my parents gave me a gray GE tape recorder for Christmas. After once again using it to record random things—like my friends and I being stupid teenagers—I found a practical use for it while serving an honorable, full-time mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1997–1999. While I wrote home to my parents nearly every week, three different times I recorded and sent a cassette letter home. That way my parents could hear my voice more often than just twice a year (Mother’s Day and Christmas).

In August of 1998, I found an even more valuable use for it. I had been keeping a written journal since December 1987. When I was nearly 10 years old, I had plenty of time but very little desire to write in it regularly; over 10 years later, it was the opposite—I had plenty of desire to write but very little time. I was serving as the “zone leader B” in the Walnut Zone of the California Arcadia Mission. That meant I was not only supposed to help the “zone leader A” with missionary work in the Orangewood Ward and Samoan wards in the Walnut California Stake, but I was also a “district leader” over two other missionary companionships and was in charge of the zone paperwork that had to be faxed weekly to the mission office in Arcadia.

My schedule reached a point where I hardly had time to write in my journal anymore. I barely had time to study the scriptures! I needed a new method of recording the day’s events and feelings, and so on Aug. 20 I resorted to using a tape recorder in lieu of a longhand journal.

For exactly 10 months to the day, I would record the day’s events—sometimes in the mornings, sometimes at night—nearly every day. I called it my “captain’s logs.” (I was and still am a Star Trek fan.) Every so often I’d miss a day or two, and so I’d have to play catch-up the next time. But I kept it up and kept purchasing blank cassette tapes—sometimes 60-minute tapes, sometimes 90-minute tapes—until my last cassette tape ran out two days before I was scheduled to return home.

While recording my captain's logs, I never concerned myself with what I was going to do with all them when I returned home. I just kept at it. When I left southern California on June 22, 1999, I had a total of 27 cassettes that were completely full—nine 60-minute tapes and eighteen 90-minute tapes, making a total of about 36 hours of recordings. At home, the longhand journals resumed.

In 2003, I finally figured out what I was going to do with all these recordings. While taking Oral History at BYU, I found a man on campus selling used transcribing machines he had fixed. I bought an old Sony industrial model—probably older than me—with a foot pedal, for $250. It’s been worth every penny.

In the 11 years since then, working on my “missionary book” has been a luxury. With most of my focus on jobs, church callings and family, there have been periods of a year or two when I wouldn't touch it. Other times, I worked on it almost daily. Over the years, I've transcribed all 27 cassettes, and edited, proofed, added end notes and proofed my missionary book again. After a long hiatus, the right time and opportunity came along in 2011 to purchase a relatively cheap but licensed copy of Adobe’s InDesign CS4. I've formatted it piecemeal, using my limited understanding of InDesign and even more limited graphic design talent. (Refer to my last blog entry. I'm the guy who only got one talent.)

As of yesterday, I’m so close to publishing it and yet so far. Yesterday, I started rearranging the end notes from where I had placed them at the end of each chapter to the back of the book (per the fourteenth edition of the Chicago Manual of Style). To those of you who know InDesign, that means I have a lot of residual problems that now need to be fixed. I also have to finish the front matter and add back matter, such as an index. At this point, this monstrosity is already approaching 500 pages. 

It’s not the kind of book you publish to sell; I’m publishing it so I can have that 10 months of my life on paper and so I can finally understand the entire publishing process—from raw manuscript to polished book. When it’s finally published, I’m only going to print about 10 copies or so. If I interacted with you as a missionary in the California Arcadia Mission, you may want to order an advanced copy from me. Because I probably talked about you.

But I promise I never recorded anyone’s flatulence.