Old wire recordings bring father's voice to woman for first time

~ Julianne Hare believes her father got the wire recorder and reels sometime in 1956.

JOPLIN, Mo. -- Julianne Hare had forgotten about the shoe box tucked away in a hidden space in her grandmother's pantry until she stumbled upon it while cleaning a shelf in preparation for painting.

The shoe box, she would learn, contained voices from the past -- and a mystery.

"When I was about 12 or 13 years old, my grandmother, who was not very tall, yelled at me from the pantry to come help her get something off a high shelf," Hare said. "That was my first time seeing those wire recordings, my dad's duck caller and his tobacco pouch.

"She told me they were recordings my dad had made of us when we were kids before he was killed in the motorcycle accident on the chat piles at Prosperity. That was in December of 1957. He had just turned 37. We packed it up and put it back on the shelf."

A wire recorder was among the first magnetic-recording devices. It used wire rather than tape on which to record sound. The model that Julianne Hare's father acquired was one sold by Montgomery Ward.

Hare's mother, Joan, died of leukemia in October 1956. When her father, Raymond "Smitty" Smith, died the next year, her grandparents took her, her three older brothers and an older sister to raise.

Hare now lives in her grandparents' old farmhouse.

"I am restoring it," she said. "I just put in new windows. They raised five little kids in this three-bedroom house. I have a sentimental attachment to it. It was a good house until the tornado hit it."

Recordings spared

On May 5, 1971, a tornado that swept across Joplin slammed into the house at Travis Acres and Newman roads, east of Missouri Southern State University. The tornado destroyed a garage and most everything in it. It was the last time anyone saw the wire recorder.

"It was on the work bench in the garage," Hare said. "I used to play with it and sing songs into it when I was little. I was about 2 years old. It had a big microphone that you set in front of it. The tornado leveled the garage. We lost everything in it."

But the wire recordings were saved and placed in the shoe box.

"When I found the shoe box, I remembered back to the wire recorder," she said. "I went on the Internet and found a place -- Avocado Productions in Arvada, Colo. -- that could take these wire recordings and put them on CDs. The woman I talked to said they were in excellent condition."'

Hare believes her father acquired the wire recorder and reels sometime before the Christmas season of 1956. She does not know how he came to possess the recorder.

Her father also purchased a Brownie movie camera and recorded film of her standing in front of the microphone while she was singing into the recorder. The camera, which did not record sound, was purchased to film the flowers that were placed on her mother's grave.

'That is your father'

When Hare got the CDs in the mail, she took them to where she works at Midcon Cables in Joplin and played them for her co-workers to hear.

"People started crying when they heard me singing," she said. "There were men's voices on the recordings. They asked me, 'Is that your dad?' I was awe-struck. I didn't know. I didn't know what his voice sounded like. I was too young when he died to remember."

She took the recordings to her aunt and asked her to listen to them.

Hare said: "She heard my Uncle Bob's voice, and then she said: 'Julianne, that is Raymond. That is your father.'

"She started tearing up, and I started crying. We could not believe his voice had been recorded. That first day, I listened to it four times. I had never heard my father's voice before then."