Vintage voices: Old records let Laconia man hear parents' voices again

LACONIA — Fred Clausen is known in the city as the former owner of a cottage colony in the Weirs, and a business leader for that neighborhood. Years ago, though, he was just a boy, playing with his brothers and looking up to his parents, Elizabeth and Frederick, the latter of who supported the family by managing hotels.

Now 79, Clausen thought the voices of his parents were only the stuff of memory, until he paid a visit to NH Vintage Vinyl last week.

“I’m the family historian, the youngest in the family. There’s two brothers left; I have all the family memorabilia,” Clausen said. He has developed a penchant, whenever family members are coming to visit, for picking out a few artifacts from his collection to put on display. At a recent gathering, he pulled out a vinyl record, which was believed to contain a recording of his mother’s voice. He didn’t have the means to play it, but he thought someone coming to the party would.

No one did — the recording format required a turntable that could turn at 78 revolutions per minute, as opposed to the more common 45 or 33 rpm — but one of his family members suggested visiting the record store downtown on Main Street.

Clausen walked in on Sept. 18, and within moments was hearing the sounds of not just his mother, but both of his parents, for the first time in decades.

It turned out Clausen had not one 78 record but two, which were made of a thin material and had become stuck together. Store employee Angela Stewart pulled them apart, then called owner Dan McLaughlin up from the basement to find equipment that could play them. McLaughlin put the first record on a vintage console, dropped the needle, and in a moment, Clausen was sent back in time.

“I started crying right away,” Clausen said. “I was extremely emotional. I was close to my parents, even though my dad passed away so soon.”

Frederick Clausen — Clausen’s father — was, at the time of the recording, managing the Sherry Netherland Hotel on Fifth Avenue in New York City, bordering Central Park. The Clausen family lived in one of the hotel’s suites, which was apparently when the recording was made.

Clausen figures the recording was made in 1946, based on the ages of his brothers, as referred to by his parents, and because of the fact he wasn’t mentioned at all; he was born in 1947. However, the records were pressed in 1964, according to the envelope they were stored in.

The recordings are short. There is one track on each side of records, and each track is about two minutes long. Three of the four are his mother, the fourth is his father.

Clausen said it sounds to him as though they were reading from a script, based on the pacing of their speech, but the words were things they would have normally said to the boys.

“My parents were of German descent, it was very regimented the way I grew up, you could tell that in the tone of their words,” Clausen said.

Frederick died in 1967, and Elizabeth in 1991. Clausen has two older brothers, Roland, who is 81, and Kenneth, who would be 79 had he not died when he was 54.

Clausen said it was “so nice” the way he was greeted and helped at NH Vintage Vinyl. “They could not have been nicer in that store,” he said. He used his phone to make a video of the records being played to share the audio with relatives.

“It just brought back memories of growing up,” he said. He could hear, on the record, his mother saying, “Daddy has to go down to work, Daddy has a busy day today, you boys are going to play in the sandbox today."

"It brought back a lot of the regimentation that we had to live through,” Clausen said. “It was really a mental high for me, those were happy tears I was crying. The voices in the story will take you back.”

McLaughlin said it was a bit of serendipity that Clausen came in on the 18th. The store isn’t usually open on Mondays, but the crew was there working anyway, so they decided to open the doors, and that led to one of the most memorable days for him.

“It was very cool to hear, the little messages and the things his parents were saying. He was just so happy to hear it again so he could share it with his family,” McLaughlin said. “It was definitely emotional. I’ve always been drawn to stuff like that to see it unfold as a piece of history.”

McLaughlin, based on what he’s seen from other recordings from that era, figures the recordings were first made using a reel-to-reel recorder, and then transferred to vinyl discs because reel-to-reel tapes didn’t have a long shelf life.

Sometimes, when people bring in decades-old home recordings, McLaughlin has the unfortunate task of telling them the medium has deteriorated beyond the point of salvation. However, that clearly wasn’t the case with Clausen’s records.

“It was a really cool experience. I’m glad he came into the store and I was able to help him out with that,” McLaughlin said.