Last week I posted an audio story about how my mom and her family communicated with each other by tape when my grandfather was deployed in Vietnam.

I mentioned the incalculable hours that in some way went into making that post and said I would explain some of the background work you didn’t see.

In 2009 I was working part time for a company that among other things converted all kinds of old media to digital. That included things like 35mm photo slides, 8mm movie film, reel-to-reel audio tapes, records, VHS tapes and cassette tapes.

Sitting in my parents’ basement were a box of reel-to-reel tapes, a few movie reels, a film projector and a reel-to-reel player. Since I learned how to use that older equipment, I set to trying to digitize my grandparents’ old stuff.

I started with the audio tapes:

Which involved this machine:

A few years earlier, my younger brother and I had tried to use the machine, but couldn’t quite figure it out. Turns out it was broken anyway. After opening it up, and a quick (lucky) find on eBay, I had a replacement belt for one of the motors and a working machine.

The transfer process can sometimes be a bit convoluted. In this case, it involved running an audio cable from the tape player to my camcorder, which was in turn connected to my computer. Slightly complicated, but it worked.

Things went well for a few tapes. For being as old as they are, they sound remarkably well.

Then while I was playing a tape, a loud BANG and a puff of white smoke came from inside the machine. I quickly unplugged it, recovered from a minor heart attack, and found that it had just blown a capacitor. I had to wait a few days for the new $0.15 modern capacitor to arrive, but it was pretty easy to solder in place and finish the recording process.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago, when I listened the audio files from each tape on my computer. Using Adobe Premiere editing software, I was able to make little clips of each section that sounded like something I might use in the story.

I just happened to be going to dinner with my parents, and brought along a (very cheap) microphone and recorder on the off chance my mom was willing to sit down for an interview. I was kind of surprised that she immediately said yes, and her insight I think added a lot to the story I was already forming in my head.

The next day I started writing the script, but stopped after about a page. What I had wasn’t terrible, but I just wasn’t happy with the direction it was going. Mainly the issue was that I did a lot more of the setup before you ever heard any of the old audio, which is really the whole story.

I stepped away for a day, and on the Metro ride into work I brought along a notebook and started over. It took a second night of writing on the subway, but I think the result was much better the second time around.

The next step was recording my audio. Without access to a recording studio, I opted for the next best location — the closet in my bedroom. With the Flashlight app on my cellphone lighting the way, I was able to record my track and feed the audio into my computer.

From there, it was just a matter of using the editing program to splice together my audio, the interview with my mom and those small clips I had pulled from the original audio.

The post last week included two pictures from the era. Those are part of more than 1,700 of my grandparents’ 35mm slides that I scanned in 2009. Just like the audio tapes, the pictures are things I had never seen and provide a look into what their lives were like back then.

They even help connect to our family today. In some of the pictures you can see a striking resemblance between my mom and aunt and some of their kids. The backgrounds of the photos inside their various houses are interesting too. They show a lot of the artwork and decorations they had that were the treasured keepsakes in their house when we packed it up five years ago.

Many of those things are in our homes today. For example, check out the wall behind my grandmother in this picture:

As I type this, I can actually reach out to my left and touch one of those scrolls, which are hanging in my bedroom.

Here’s a bonus piece of audio (50 seconds) from the tapes that didn’t make the original story, with my grandfather talking about where he got the scrolls:

So, lots of overall work, but definitely worth experiencing those memories.