Transcription Mystery Disc #96

This one turns out to be pretty rare. It spins at 78 rpm and dates to June 1th 1943. It's a recording of a serviceman sent to his wife or girlfriend back home. the recording begins in french and then switches to English. He's been injured but expects to be walking again soon. He runs out of things to say and remarks that the other boys are singing into the other machines. Clearly the Red Cross was operating multiple machines simultaneously at the recording stations.

I've found two other images online. One was on Flickr and the other on the website of Sound Savers, a company that digitizes these sorts of acetates.Anyone who follows the hobby at all, knows that Voice-O-Graph's Wilcox-Gay, Audiodisc, Perma-Disk, Duodisc, Recordisc and Presto are all fairly common. This strikes me as something that should be, with the official Red Cross connection, but I've never seen one before. You can find transcriptions of the "Red Cross Show" and Red Cross Public Service Announcements... but no Red Cross acetates.


It's manufacture is very similar to the Wilcox-Gay Recordio Type 1A documented at Phonozoic. However the outermost line that marks the beginning of the recording is always red on Recordios. This one is blue. On the envelope it refers to the contents as a "recordiogram."  Wilcox-Gay referred to their mailed home recordings as recordiograms. You can see an image on the WFMU website here.  It's hard to see, but when held up to the light, the red cross disc also clearly has 2 more un-punched holes under that label. In 2000 we called those hanging chads. My suspicion is that Wilcox-Gay in fact did the manufacture, and that the Red Cross made their own labels to stick on them, the Wilcox labels are sometimes printed directly onto the disc, the Red Cross are glossy and might have just been stuck right over them.

Red Cross Radio

The Red Cross has always been a media machine. In the 1920s they published a magazine. They run radio, TV and print advertisements everywhere. They were virtually the inventors of viral advertising trying experiments brand propagation such as sponsoring parade floats. All this and the organization is still largely non-profit and mostly focused on social services. Their work is on an international scale and strangely despite their century of media savvy they only started a radio channel last year.

Largely they'd left the dissemination of emergency service information to NOAA and the shortwave crowd. Somtimes local Red Cross outfits even host relays for shortwave stations. This includes KB1FLH, KC7ZUH, KC2ESD and many others.

Grundig now makes a Red Cross branded Emergency Radio, the FR400. It sports a turn crank for power and tunes all seven NOAA weather alert channels, and TV channels 2-13. It also, in a modern twist also has a cell phone charger with adapters for most common brands.

The new Red Cross information channel is not on terrestrial radio. It's a Satellite channel. (XM Channel 248), is an XM satellite radio channel. It started to provide 24-hour news and information for Hurricane Katrina victims, Red Cross workers along the Gulf Coast and across the country.

XM is donated radios to the Red Cross for relief workers, shelters and aid stations. The Red Cross is not only using the XM Radio channel to deliver news and info directly to workers but is also using the channel to send mass messages to staff across the country. Red Cross Radio is airing continuous updates on the relief efforts in New Orleans and other Gulf Coast areas devastated by Katrina, as well as the sites where victims have been relocated to receive Red Cross assistance.