The radio was not very interesting though, it hissed and cracked and swished along with the slider movements, sometimes there would float up an announcer’s voice reading the news in some unknown Bucharestian language, a little farther along the stripe it would be replaced with a Russian voice repeating the news from the wall radio. Yet, lifting the lid on top of Radiola, you kinda opened a tiny theater with the round stage of red velvet having a shining pin in the center to slip on it the hole in a record disk when loading it on the pad. Next to it, the slightly crooked poker of the white plastic adapter sat on its stand.
With the turntable switched on and spinning the disk, the adapter had to be carefully picked up from its stand, brought over the whirling disk's surface and lowered in between the wide-set initial grooves running round and round and after a couple of hissing turns there would start a song about Chico-Chico from Costa Rica, or about O, Mae Caro, or about a war soldier marching in a field along the steep river bank.
The cabinet under Radiola held a stack of paper envelopes with gleaming black disks made at the record factory in the Aprelev City whose name was printed on the round labels about the center hole, beneath the song’s title, and the name of the singer, and the instruction that the rotation speed was 78 rpm.
Next to the adapter’s perch, there was the gearshift lever with notches for 33, 45, and 78 rpm. Disks of 33 rpm were much narrower and spun slower than 78 rpm disks, but they—so small—had two songs on each side!
Natasha shared it with us that when you launched a 33 rpm disk at the speed of 45 rpm then even the Soviet Army Choir named after Aleksandrov began to sing with Lilliputian puppet voices…
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Dad never was too keen on reading. He read nothing but The Radio magazine full of schematic blueprints of capacitor-resistor-diodes, which every month appeared in the mailbox on our apartment door. And, since Dad was a Party man, they also put there the daily Pravda and the monthly The Blocknote of Agitator filled with the hopelessly dense text running for one or two endless paragraphs per page and not a single picture in the whole issue except for Lenin's profile on the cover.
Because of his Party membership, twice a week Dad attended the Party Studies Evening School, if it was his “dog watch” week. He went there after work to write down the lessons in a thick copybook of leatherette covers because after two years of studying Dad had to pass a very difficult exam.