Walk on by

As you may know, I've been listening to a lot of my old cassettes lately, both in my car (which has a tape deck) and on my home stereo for my Mixology series about mix tapes. So I felt a pang of sadness to hear that Sony was discontinuing its iconic Walkman line of portable cassette players. Actually, first I felt a pang of surprise because I figured Sony had stopped making the cassette Walkman years ago; the company still uses the Walkman name on its MP3 players.

The Walkman first made its debut in 1979 and within a few years, EVERYBODY had one. I was rockin' a transistor radio at the time, but in 1982, I got my first Walkman (it looked like this, about 10 times the size of my current iPod Nano). I bought vinyl only, but I recorded my albums onto cassettes so I could listen to them on my Walkman at school. I remember one of the first tapes I made had Ozzy's Blizzard of Ozz on one side and Maiden's Number of the Beast on the other. Another had Robert Plant's Pictures at Eleven and Rush's Signals on the flip. I didn't have proper audio cables at first; I was just putting a little boombox in front of the stereo speakers and recording what came out. A few years later, I commandeered my dad's stereo components since he never used them anymore, but it didn't have a tape deck. I got an all-in-one receiver/turntable/tape deck to take to college and made some tapes using that, but it wasn't until a few years later that I picked up a decent double cassette deck and my quality tape-making days really began.

Of course, after the Walkman debuted, there were many imitators that followed. I picked up a new tape player (possibly a Toshiba) in '84 and gave my Walkman to my little brother. By this point, the players were getting smaller. I owned a few more over the years. I still have a Walkman that works. I remember using it when I was training for my first marathon in 2002. I had a Diamond Rio MP3 player at the time, but it would freeze up on cold days, so sometimes I brought the old tape player. Eventually, though, I bought an iPod and cassettes became a fuzzy memory, until the last year or so.

And even though the iPod has exponentially outsold its predecessor, I'll always have a warm place in my heart for the Walkman.