The 45 record is the little sibling to the larger 33 long play (LP) or 78 RPM records. In my era, they were popular back in the ’60s and ’70s, because you could purchase a specific popular song, kind of like iTunes of today, you weren’t tied to purchasing a whole album for just 1 song.
There was a downside to the 45′s. From what I remember, the 45′s came out mainly for the top 40 hits, so if you did like another song from the album that was not a popular song on the radio, chances were good, that it was not available on a 45 record.
The store nearest to my house that sold 45′s, was oddly enough, a Singer Sewing store in a strip mall. For those that don’t know, Singer makes sewing machines and supplies sewing supplies. Why they got into selling 45 records, I will probably never know. Maybe they figured it would keep us kids occupied, while the mother’s shopped in the store.
The record player that we had only had the narrow style spindle, so we had to purchase these plastic adapters (pictured below) that clipped into the large center hole of the 45 records, providing the proper size hole that fit our spindle. I remember that these things would keep popping out of the record while it was playing and the record would spin off-center, wreaking havoc for the needle.
I can’t say that I miss the sound of the pops & scratches from my old records.
