•September 28, 2022•
By Jim Baumann
NP Guest Writer

I was decluttering recently and happened upon my lab journals from some of the engineering courses I took in college.
I’ve always had it in my mind that I could be an inventor, whether they be things or words. I failed miserably at the former, so I’ve focused on the latter.
In one class, my lab partner, John Wayne (I kid you not), and I worked up a concept for a gizmo that would eject a cassette tape, flip the tape to the B side and play it, then eject it and load another tape from a carousel.
Think of a jukebox, but less sensible.
Sure, it would have been difficult to retrofit it for anything but my Sankyo stereo cassette deck, and it would have been about the size of a Costco shopping cart, but we thought we were onto something.
That was in 1982, just before Sony entered the market with the first commercially produced compact disc player.
That was the death knell for cassettes. And not long after that, I abandoned engineering for the word business.
Fast forward (pun unintended, but I’ll keep it) 40 years. My wife and I were planting a tree last weekend, and my buddy Kevin lent me a pair of shovels and a mattock.     Login or Subscribe to read the rest of this story.