For a guy making his living in the consumer electronics industry, Dad does not much care for consumer electronics or the pop culture they convey. He often boasts of having “completely missed” Elvis and the Beatles, and the only popular music he will ever bother committing to memory is—for reasons known only to him—the chorus to Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again” and the title phrase in “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.”
Rather, the car radio is for dispensing news. That news is sonic boredom, a tedium delivered by auditory nerve to numb the brain and deaden the body. Dad wants a complacent backseat on long car rides so that he never has to make good on his frequent threats to come back there, to pull over, to stop this car right now. He makes do instead with the occasional backhanded swat, whose accuracy is a source of wonder since he never takes his eyes off the road.
One phrase seems to come up so often on the car radio—“House Ways and Means Committee”—that I will eventually come to think of it as a musical act of the era: House, Ways, and Means, like Emerson, Lake, and Palmer or Earth, Wind, and Fire or Crosby, Stills, and Nash.
The man responsible for our car radio is also responsible, not incidentally, for my father’s livelihood. Bill Lear and his partner, Elmer Wavering, created the first commercially practical car radio in the 1920s, for the Galvin Manufacturing Company in Chicago. By then, car radios had been preemptively banned in many cities for the potential havoc they might cause distracted drivers, who might be tempted to Lindy Hop along to the radio. Lear installed his radio in the Studebaker owned by his boss, Paul Galvin, who suggested they call the new device a Motorola.
Wavering would one day become president of Galvin’s company, which they renamed Motorola, which itself was a nod to the Victrola, which allowed people at home to play their own music. By the mid-1950s, there was still no satisfactory way to listen to anything in the car other than whatever the radio happened to play. And so, in three of its 1956 models, Chrysler offered the Highway Hi-Fi, an in-car record player that could play specially manufactured 7-inch discs at 16? rpm, for about an hour of music on either side. The system worked surprisingly well: as the DeSoto traversed potholes and S curves, the records were not prone to skipping.
In its 1961 models, Chrysler offered a less expensive record player, which it called the Auto Victrola. As with the Highway Hi-Fi, the stylus seldom jumped the groove, but there was still something inherently ridiculous about playing records in a moving vehicle, never mind storing and flipping those LPs at the wheel. There had to be a better way to free oneself from the tyranny of the radio disc jockey.
At about this time, after decades of making airplane radios and navigation devices—mostly for the military—Bill Lear set about designing and manufacturing a private jet that could fly as fast as a 707 or DC-8. The new plane was targeted to wealthy businessmen like himself. Shortly after the Learjet got off the ground in 1963, Lear flew one from his home base in Wichita to the airport in Santa Monica. There, one of his daughters collected him in a Lincoln Continental she had borrowed from a friend whose father was the zany entrepreneur Earl “Madman” Muntz.
Madman Muntz was a wildly successful automobile salesman who had pioneered the loud television hard sell to move cars off his lot. His dealership billboards all over the Southland read I BUY ’EM RETAIL AND SELL ’EM WHOLESALE—MORE FUN THAT WAY. Another claimed I WANNA GIVE ’EM AWAY—BUT MRS. MUNTZ WON’T LET ME. SHE’S CRAZY! (In fact, there would be seven different Mrs. Muntzes over the years.) Madman Muntz also manufactured and sold televisions, and was the first to measure the screens diagonally, to make them appear bigger than his competitors’ in advertisements. Muntz so prospered selling TVs this way that he named one of his daughters Tee Vee.
When Bill Lear arrived at Santa Monica Airport that day in 1963, he saw that Muntz had rigged his latest brainchild to the dashboard of his son’s Lincoln—a four-track tape player Madman called the Muntz Autostereo. Fascinated, Lear brought several of the four-track cartridges and playback machines back to Wichita. He dissected the cartridges and decided he could create a better system from scratch. His would have eight tracks instead of four, two hours of music spooling on an infinite loop, so the driver never had to flip the tape over.
Lear was interested in installing this eight-track system on his Learjet, of course, but he also saw it as a consumer product of much broader interest. There was no evidence for this—at the time there was no appetite at all for the eight-track tape, in part because no one yet knew of its existence—but that scarcely mattered to Bill Lear.
He leased from Motorola a fifty-four-thousand-square-foot warehouse in Detroit and set about manufacturing eight-track cartridges, anticipating a market that didn’t yet exist. “Tape playback in automobiles is going to be the next big thing,” he said. “I’m going to be in the position of a man with a boat full of life jackets following a ship he knows is going to sink. He won’t have any trouble selling them.”
Like Muntz, Lear was an eccentric man, a serial philanderer who married four times and enjoyed calling business associates from the phone in his executive bathroom so that—in the words of one colleague—“they could hear him tinkle” as he talked.
Colleagues could actually picture him selling life jackets to the passengers of a sinking ship, except Lear could also be charming and convivial, and most endearingly—at least to me—he had a love of wordplay, to judge by the name he gave one of his daughters.
He was picked up in the borrowed Lincoln that fateful day at Santa Monica Airport by his daughter Shanda.
Shanda Lear.
Ford first offered the Lear Jet Stereo Eight player and compatible eight-track tapes in some of its 1966 models. I am a 1966 model myself, lightly used, now crossing the border from Wisconsin into Minnesota on July 21, 1969, not yet old enough to be grateful to Bill Lear for inventing the eight-track tape that my father sells for Mickey Mouse Mining.
I am likewise ignorant of Lear’s friend and former partner, Elmer Wavering, who invented the automotive alternator, which made possible power windows, power steering, and air-conditioning, none of which we yet have in the butterscotch Impala now yielding to the gravitational pull of the Saint Paul suburbs.