One of my most vivid memories at C. Crane, was when I was very new. This was circa 1997. We were in the brown house over on 10th street for those of you who visited. This was a period when Art Bell was just starting to take off and each day Bob would share how many new stations picked up his show. To say things were busy for us would be an understatement.
On the far wall of the showroom (our retail location where folks could come in and purchase), we had what we affectionately called the “bank” – with shelves containing rows of cassette answering machines. Back then there wasn’t affordable digital storage or VOIP or anything like that. We were (are) a small company in a rural location so phone services weren’t readily available and were expensive. The internet was still in its infancy, so most people called to receive a catalog.
We had Panasonic cassette answering machines and those things were workhorses! I’m pretty sure there were 24 at one point because that’s the max lines we could have coming into the building. The only problem is they could only hold one cassette so we had the longest cassettes you could find at 110 minutes (there were 120 minute cassettes, but the tape was thin and would often break), and when there was a big show or ad coming up sometimes one of us would stay the night to flip or change out the tapes in the machines so we wouldn’t miss any messages. Yes, these were the days before auto reverse 😊. I remember telling my family I was staying the night at work to change the tapes and them looking completely incredulous. It was a wild ride.
We’d then have to find time to listen to the messages from the tapes and enter the catalog requests or take the message. We often had stacks of cassettes piled a foot high waiting to be transcribed. At times, we even had to hire additional help for this particular task. Some of the most memorable moments and hearty laughs in those days came from listening to the messages left by our customers.
I can’t tell you how motivated we were to find a digital solution. It’s so funny to reflect on this time since so much has changed. My kids only know what a cassette is because I’ve told them, or they’ve seen it in a movie. They’ve never actually used one. Answering machine storage can still be something that bites you though if you’re not paying attention. Even when we transitioned to VOIP, the service had limited storage, and our mailbox would fill up if we weren’t careful. It’s a lesson we’ve carried with us in all our phone-related purchases, as this issue seems to crop up at the most inconvenient times.
Indeed, times have certainly changed, and technology has come a long way since our answering machine days at C. Crane.
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Oh the good old days .My brother inlaw had a answering machine that used a small single cassette. So when the outgoing message was finished the machine then would search for a blank space the caller could leave a message .Sometimes it took a few minutes before you could leave a message LOL
I still have a couple of cassettes from our answering machine. I could not throw them out because they have messages from my Mom and my wife’s Mother who have been gone for many years.
I worked in the purchasing department at Caterpillar when answering machines were just being introduced to business and replacing real live people answering services. Some of my coworkers refused to “talk” to an answering machine early on. But the machines became commonplace and it was realized that they had real value.
Ron
I am a frequent SWL, AIR, FM, and MW listener and enjoy discovering new stations. This is a very rewarding hobby.
Immediately thought of The Rockford Files… phone rings, “This is Jim Rockford, at the tone….”(cue music)
So how many of you “heard” this as you read this? Ah the good ol days =0)
I had a similar Panasonic model answering machine (“Easa-Phone”) bought in 1988 for $75 at Pay-N-Pak in Eureka. Yes, it was a workhorse — for 22 years! I saved cassettes from it, and digitized messages from my mom.
I still have a tiny cassette from a long-gone machine but no machine to play it on. I don’t even know what’s on it.
I was finally able to make it to your physical location in Fortuna, CA last summer and bought a CC WiFI 3. For me, this was something I had wanted to do for years, since the early days of listening to Art Bell talk about the products, and even more so after Art’s death a few years ago. The CC WiFi is absolutely fantastic, by the way. I’ve found several streaming sources playing old Art Bell C2CAM shows (24/7) and I listen constantly. Seriously, this radio is really cool and I use it so much more than ever thought I would. It’s really feature-packed too.
As I recall, when answering machines first started to go digital, just the outgoing message was digital and the incoming messages continued to be recorded on tape—usually micro-cassette by this point. This, of course, had a lot of advantages—smaller size of machine, still allowed for lots of incoming recording space, allowed for easy and immediate archival of an incoming message(s) if needed, no degradation of the outgoing message quality over time due to tape wear, etc.
Cool blog post; please keep them coming!