Lifestyle
In a frenetic digital era, he’s helping Angelenos rediscover the classic cassette player
Stepping into Jr. Market boutique in Highland Park is like entering a 1980s time warp. Built into a refurbished shipping container, it’s filled with everything from tiny Walkman-style portables to colorful, number-flip clock radios and, naturally, boom boxes of all sizes. Few are more imposing than the TV the Searcher, a Sharp boom box from the early ’80s that features a built-in, 5-inch color television.
“Try lifting it, it’s really heavy,” warns Spencer Richardson, the shop’s owner. Indeed, the machine is at least 15 pounds without the 10 D batteries that power the unit. He adds, “I don’t think you’re taking this to the beach so you could watch TV while you listen to music.”
An affable, hyper-knowledgeable proprietor in his early 30s, Richardson repairs and resells analog music technology from the 1980s or earlier. In bringing these rehabbed players back into circulation, he’s helping others rediscover a musical format once left for dead. While his hobby-turned-side hustle started as “a gateway to discover sounds” that he otherwise would not have heard, it now attracts curious customers willing to drop $100-plus for a vintage Technics RS-M2 or My First Sony Walkman. His customers include older baby boomers and Gen Xers nostalgic for the players of their childhood, but most have been millennials like himself, drawn to something tactile and analog in an era when everything else disappears into the digital ether.
A rare Technics RS-M2 stereo radio tape deck. “I’ve worked on a lot of tape players and this one shouts quality inside and out,” Richardson writes on Instagram.
(Spencer Richardson)
Unlike turntables, which have become increasingly high-tech thanks to the “vinyl revival” of the last 20 years, almost all cassette players in current production rely on the same, basic tape mechanism from Taiwan, Richardson explains. Though cassette culture is enjoying its own period of rediscovery — albeit on a far smaller scale — he hasn’t seen a market emerge for newly engineered tape decks. And he’s fine with that.
“I’m not one of those people that’s like, ‘Why don’t they make good new tape players?’” he says. “No one needs to make it better. You’re still better off buying a refurbished one from the time when they made them.”
That’s where he steps in.
Richardson works on a Nakamichi tape deck out of his repair studio in downtown L.A.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
It’s easy to forget that when cassettes debuted in the mid-1960s, the technology was groundbreaking. Not only were the players far more portable than turntables but unlike records, tapes were resilient to being tossed about. Even more profoundly, cassettes democratized access to the act of recording itself since cassette technology required minimal infrastructure and cost.
“I think about how incredible it must have been for people to realize they could just put whatever they wanted onto a tape, dub it, give it to a friend,” says Richardson.
Entire genres of music, especially in the developing world, became far more accessible across borders. In some countries, big records are still released on cassette. “I have a Filipino release of Kanye West’s ‘College Dropout’ on tape,” Richardson says.
The constraints of the technology guided the listening experience. Because skipping songs on a player was a hassle, most people sat with cassette albums as a track-by-track, linear journey, the antithesis to the algorithmic, shuffle-centric playlists ubiquitous on today’s streaming platforms. It’s a pace that Richardson appreciates.
“I want things to be intentional and slow,” he says. “I don’t need them to be optimized.”
He learned how to repair gear by watching YouTube videos, perusing old manuals and through trial and error.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Born in the early 1990s, Richardson grew up in Santa Monica and the Pacific Palisades, where his mother’s home was lost in the L.A. wildfires last year. He’s just old enough to remember cassettes as a child: “My mom had books on tape like ‘Winnie the Pooh,’ but I wasn’t out buying tapes.” Fast forward to the mid-2010s and he was working at the now-defunct Touch Vinyl in West L.A. “Back in 2014, we started this little in-store tape label,” he explained. “Bands would come to play, and we’d duplicate 10 tapes and give them away or sell them.” Richardson slowly began collecting cassettes but after the store closed a few years later, he realized how hard it was to find people to service his tape players.
Finally, once the pandemic hit in 2020 and everyone was stuck at home, he decided to learn how to repair his gear by watching YouTube. “I was just fascinated by the videos, absorbing soldering techniques and tools you might need,” he said. With no formal engineering background, Richardson began collecting information online, perusing old manuals, learning through trial and error. “You just need to get your hands in there and be like, ‘Oh, OK, I see how this works,’ or maybe I don’t see how this works, and I’m just going to bang my head against the wall, and then a year later, try again.” His first successful repair was for his Teac CX-311, a compact stereo cassette player/recorder that he still owns. “It has some quirks but runs well.”
A few years later, Richardson’s girlfriend, Faith, suggested he start selling his players online via an Instagram account — jrmarket.radio — originally created for a short-lived internet station. Tim Mahoney, his childhood friend and a professional photographer, shot the units against a plain white backdrop, as if for an art catalog. A community of enthusiasts quickly found his account and Richardson began selling pieces online and via pop-ups. In 2024, the owners of vintage clothing store the Bearded Beagle invited him to take over the parking lot space behind their new location on Figueroa Street Opening a brick-and-mortar store hadn’t been his ambition but Richardson accepted the opportunity: “I never envisioned opening my own physical store. It’s hard enough to have a retail space in Los Angeles to sell something that’s very niche.”
Jr. Market operates as a shop Thursday through Saturday in Highland Park.
(Spencer Richardson)
Jr. Market — whose name is inspired by Japanese convenience stores known as “junior markets” — isn’t trying to appeal to audiophiles though Richardson does stock studio-quality recording decks. He primarily looks for players with appealing visual design, most of them made in Japan where Richardson has been traveling to since graduating high school. Through those trips, he’s learned where to source pristinely kept gear, including his best-selling Corocasse: a bright red plastic cube of a radio/tape player, introduced by National in 1983. He also keeps an eye out for the unique Sanyo MR-QF4 from 1979, an elongated boom box with four speakers, designed to play either horizontally or flipped into a vertical tower.
The store also stocks a small selection of portable record players, including a Victor PK-2, a whimsical, plastic-bodied three-in-one turntable, tape player and AM radio that looks like something designed by a modernist artist for Fisher-Price. That went to local author and historian Sam Sweet, who visited the store with no intention of buying anything and left with the Victor, which now sits on his writing desk. “Spencer’s part of a grand tradition of workshop tinkerers and specialty mechanics,” Sweet says. “The refurbished devices he sells are as much a reflection of his ethos and expertise as they are treasures of the past.”
Last year, Imma Almourzaeva, an Echo Park art director, came to the store and purchased a massive 1979 Sony Zilba’p boom box, which is nearly 2 feet wide and over a foot tall, with wood veneer panels to boot. Almourzaeva, who grew up in Russia in the ’90s, wanted a player that offered “the tactile feel of my childhood and bringing it back into my daily routine, something familiar, something warm.” The Zilba’p is the largest boom box Richardson has carried and Almourzaeva said, “It’s aesthetically a showstopper. Maybe I have a Napoleon complex because I’m pretty small too. It’s like ‘go big or go home’ for me.” She shared that she recently bought a Soviet-era boom box from Richardson for her brother for Christmas. “It turned out my mom grew up using the same brand of stereo,” Almourzaeva says. Richardson had told her that Soviet boom boxes are “very DIY, more funky and finicky.”
Refurbishment is one of Richardson’s specialties, including repairing customer units, each of them a puzzle he enjoys solving. No matter if a player is sparse or feature-packed, the simple act of playing a cassette creates a sense of calm and focus for him. “You’re not distracted, because it doesn’t do anything else,” he says. In a time where every “smart” device is marketed with dizzying arrays of features, that simplicity can feel downright revolutionary.
It’s been 80 years since Adolf Hitler shot himself in his bunker, yet our fascination with the Nazi era seems eternal. By now I’ve read and seen so many different things that I’m always surprised when somebody offers a new angle on what the Nazis wrought.
Ian Buruma does this in Stay Alive: Berlin, 1939-1945, a new book about living in a country where you have no control over what happens. Inspired by the experience of his Dutch father, Leo, who was forced to do factory work in Berlin, Buruma uses diaries, memoirs and some personal interviews — most of the witnesses are dead, of course — to explore how it felt to be in Berlin during World War II. He weaves together a chronicle that carries Berliners from the triumphant days when Germany steamrolled Poland and daily life felt almost “normal” (unless you were Jewish, of course) through the end of the war when bombs pulverized the city, and Soviet soldiers arrived to rape and pillage.
As he writes of air raid drills, food shortages and the incessant deluge of rumors, Buruma has to deal with the difficulty that most ordinary Germans left behind very little record. They kept their heads down and tried to stay alive. And so the book moves among more interesting characters whose multiplicity gives dimension to our usual flattened sense of Nazi Germany.
We meet Coco Schumann, a young Jewish guitarist who risks his life to play the jazz music that Nazis considered degenerate. We meet 15-year-old Lilo, who starts off thinking that Nazi ideals make life beautiful, but comes to admire the greater nobility of those who tried to assassinate Hitler. There’s the dissident intelligence officer Helmuth von Moltke, a conservative who seeks to work from inside against the Nazis (he gets hanged for his trouble). And there’s Erich Alenfeld, a Jew who converted to Christianity and remained a German patriot: He sent a letter to Reichsminister Hermann Göring asking if he could serve.
We also encounter several of the usual suspects, most notably propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels who, when not coercing young actresses into sex, is busy generating false headlines, ordering movie spectacles to distract the masses (he loved Disney films), and monitoring the city’s morale. Always laying down edicts — like ordering Jews to wear the yellow star — he’s the Nazi who may have done most to affect Berlin’s daily life: He even keeps banning and reinstating dancing.
Along the way, Stay Alive is laced with nifty details. How one family trained its parrot to say “Heil, Hitler” to fool the Nazis if they came to arrest someone. How, a crew of filmmakers kept shooting a movie with no film in the camera so they wouldn’t be drafted to fight doomed last ditch battles. How Jewish villas in the posh Grunewald area were bought up or seized by Nazi bigshots, but now belong to Russian oligarchs. And how some of those trying to elude the Nazis became known as U-boats, because they dived into the city’s murky underworld, even hiding out in brothels.
As one who’s written well for decades about historical guilt and denial, Buruma is too savvy to belabor familiar Nazi horrors. That said, he offers two dark truths that strike me as being especially apt in these days when authoritarianism is making a worldwide comeback.
The first is that you can’t live in a dirty system without somehow being corrupted. Whether you were a famous symphony conductor or a cop on the beat, Nazism tainted virtually everyone, forcing people to do and say abhorrent things they often didn’t believe in, and weakening their moral compass. As von Moltke wrote his wife: “Today, I can endure the sufferings of others with an equanimity I would have found execrable a year ago.”
He wasn’t alone. The second dark truth is how easy it is to simply go along. Most Berliners — and even Buruma’s own father — did their jobs, took their pleasures and preferred not to think about the evils under their noses. This, Buruma says, “is disturbing but should not surprise anyone. Human beings adapt, carry on, turn away from things they don’t wish to see or hear.”
If the book has a hero, it’s probably Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, a journalist who didn’t turn away. Along with her partner, the conductor Leo Borchard, she ran a resistance group named Uncle Emil, risking her life to protect Jews, help them escape, and support other groups battling the Nazis. All this makes her much braver than I’ve ever been. But I equally admire her refusal to be sanctimonious about those who, fearing prison or worse, didn’t rise up against the dictatorship. She had the rare virtue of being righteous without being self-righteous.
Are you interested in creating a native habitat or have questions about your plants? Come meet experts from the Theodore Payne Foundation and the California Native Plant Society, along with Times staffers, at the L.A. Times Plants booth during The Times’ Festival of Books at USC on April 18 and 19.
In a new location this year — booth 554 in the Red Zone — the L.A. Times Plants booth will be a tribute to L.A. Times plants writer Jeanette Marantos, a passionate supporter of native plants, who died in February.
There will be giveaways of hundreds of 4-inch plants from Theodore Payne and The Times throughout the weekend. Also, anyone who signs up for our free monthly L.A. Times Plants newsletter will receive Jeanette’s Mix, a special packet of sunflower seeds and California poppy seeds that Marantos hoped to offer this year.
Jeanette Marantos at the L.A. Times Plants booth at Festival of Books on April 21, 2024.
(Maryanne Pittman)
We’ll also have colorful plant-inspired stickers and copies of the Weekend print section with Times garden coverage to give away.
Booth visitors will be able to smell and look at plants from the Theodore Payne Foundation and learn how native plants can not only save water but also support local wildlife such as bees, birds and monarch butterflies. Theodore Payne will also have merchandise available for purchase and other seed packets to hand out.
As part of the booth, representatives from the California Native Plant Society will show visitors how to use Calscape, an online database of native plants that allows you to customize your landscape needs based on your ZIP Code.
Stop by the L.A. Times Plants booth (booth 554 in the Red Zone) between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. on April 18 or from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on April 19. The Festival of Books is held on the USC campus. For more information, check the festival’s FAQ page.
David Bowie debuted his Ziggy Stardust persona and released The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars in 1972 — the last year humans went to the moon.
Evening Standard/Getty Images/Hulton Archive
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Evening Standard/Getty Images/Hulton Archive
The Artemis II rocket launched on Wednesday, carrying astronauts to the moon for the first time in over half a century.
The four-person crew is headed on a 10-day, 230,000-mile journey around the moon and back — a pivotal test of the Orion spacecraft that NASA hopes will bring future astronauts to the lunar surface as soon as 2028 and Mars after that.
The last time humans went to the moon was the Apollo 17 mission in December 1972.
The final Apollo mission involved three astronauts: Command module pilot Ronald Evans orbited above as Eugene Cernan and Harrison “Jack” Schmitt — a professional geologist, in a notable first — touched down on the moon’s Taurus-Littrow valley.
The pair spent just over three days on the lunar surface, collecting some 250 pounds of moon rock and soil samples. They set multiple records, including the longest stay on the moon (75 hours), the most lunar samples collected and the longest mission duration at 12 days, 14 hours.
NASA astronaut Eugene Cernan, commander of the Apollo 17 lunar mission, is welcomed back to Earth after splashing down in the Pacific Ocean on Dec. 19, 1972.
NASA/Getty Images/Hulton Archive
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NASA/Getty Images/Hulton Archive
The crew knew they would be the last to visit the moon at least for the foreseeable future, as NASA had decided two years earlier to cancel the remaining Apollo missions, primarily due to budget cuts.
Cernan became the last human to walk on the moon on Dec. 14, 1972. He acknowledged the significance of the moment out loud as he stepped off the lunar surface, seemingly nodding to Neil Armstrong’s infamous words from the 1969 moon landing.
“As we leave the moon and Taurus-Littrow, we leave as we came — and God willing as we shall return: with peace, and in hope, for all mankind,” said Cernan, who died in 2023.
A lot has changed in the 53 years since. Here’s what life was like the last time astronauts launched to the moon.
A banner year for geopolitics, pop culture and technology
Richard Nixon became the first U.S. president to visit China in February 1972.
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The year 1972 is in many ways synonymous with upheaval: the uncovering of the Watergate scandal, “Bloody Sunday” in Northern Ireland, the “Munich massacre” at the 1972 Olympics, North Vietnam’s “Easter Offensive” in the final years of the Vietnam War — and antiwar protests at college campuses and political conventions.
That was the year President Nixon announced that no more draftees would be sent to Vietnam, and the year he visited China in a presidential first.
The Volkswagen Beetle officially surpassed the Ford Model T as the most popular — and most-produced — car in the world. And a gallon of regular gasoline cost 36 cents, or the equivalent of $2.53 a gallon today, according to the AARP.
Herbie, the anthropomorphic Volkswagen Beetle featured in the 1969 Disney film The Love Bug, terrorizes a young woman at a car show in Berlin in June 1972.
Keystone/Getty Images/Hulton Archive
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Keystone/Getty Images/Hulton Archive
1972 was also a major year for still-beloved cultural creations. It marked the debut of David Bowie’s alter ego Ziggy Stardust, the formation of ABBA, the opening of Grease on Broadway. The top-selling album of the year was Neil Young’s Harvest, and the biggest box office hit was The Godfather, which came out in March.
Fashion was dominated by bold colors and patterns, bell-bottoms, shawls, platform shoes and synthetic fabrics, as part of “the Polyester Decade.” Style icons included Bianca Jagger, Jane Birkin and Diana Ross.
Mick Jagger and Bianca Jagger, pictured in 1972, were among the style icons of the era.
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Central Press/Getty Images/Hulton Archive
There was a lot of news, but fewer ways to consume it. Some 95 percent of U.S. households owned televisions, according to Census data, and just three commercial broadcast networks dominated the airwaves: ABC, CBS and NBC. Total print newspaper circulation reached a record 62.5 million, before it began to drop.
And of course, it was a time of innovation — and not just in space. The digital watch made its debut. Atari published “Pong,” the first commercially successful arcade video game. Other key inventions from that year include the floppy disk, the first handheld scientific calculator (the HP-35) and the Hacky Sack. McDonald’s Egg McMuffin entered test markets, and Shrinky Dinks were on the brink of creation.
According to Merriam Webster, some of the words recorded in print for the first time in 1972 include: animatronic, beer pong, bird flu, habanero, garage band, glam rock, lowrider, page-turner, sound bite, spaghetti strap, veggie burger, women’s studies and yard sale. Far out!
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