Did you have a boombox in Brooklyn in the 1980s?

Just think how times have changed: 0% of the youth of today had boomboxes in the 1980s in Brooklyn.

i used to take my dad's boombox out to our pool with me when i went swimming. when my friend came over from her house next door, she always made me play her sarah mclachlan tape on it. i guess there's a reason that you only want "brooklyn in the 1980s" stories.

[quote="billtron"]I'm curious. Of the people I've spoken to, about half said that back in the day they called the thing a ghettoblaster. Was that name used here? Did you have another name for it?[/quote
I've heard people call it that, but we always used to just call it a boom box.

Disclaimer: I didn't grow up in Brooklyn, I grew up in Detroit.

But I did have several. I used them primarily for setting them on the deck of my halfpipe (or some other one me aad friends were skating) and blasting such ditties as Public Enemy's "Yo BumRush the Show" or D.R.I. "Crossover".

We def. called them "ghettoblasters".

I recently met a guy who collects them. I was so in awe.

I now have this tattoo:

I remember being at the 125th Street stop on the way to Yankee Stadium once in the early 80's, sweltering summer, a young teenager, and a guy walking down the stairs with an enormous boombox, you could hear the music approaching, impending from a block away, blasting Grandmaster Flash and inexorably claiming the space much to the annoyance of the suburban dads taking us on an outing to the stadium. No one said anything for the 5 or 10 minutes until the train came, and the song stuck with me for years until I finally learned what it was. There was no way to look it up then and no one I asked knew.

The music and the man were so impossibly foreign and exotic to me as a 13 year old in 1981.

The other thing that stuck with me is that the guy looked a lot like Oscar Gamble who hit a home run that day for the Yankees. Upper deck, right field.

Contemporarily, I know a guy who went to the Turbo Sonic store in Tokyo and dropped like 3 G's. He flew to Tokyo just to go to the store. He complains about ow hard it is to find vintage boomboxes.

Oh yeah, I had a boombox from about 81 to 85. I also referred to it as a ghetto blaster, even though I lived in Windsor Terrace (well, at least until 82.) Hardly the ghetto, even back then.

Mostly used to take to Brighton Beach, didn't play a lot of disco, mostly rock, although depending on who I was hanging out with, some reggae might have been in the mix. Played it on the train, although we'd always be on the lookout for cops (but probably more because we were drinking beer and smoking cigarettes...last car on the train was where the hooligans hung out, smoking, drinking, even sometimes smoking pot.

My boombox was an Aiwa, and it was hot (as in stolen). It cranked though...it was the size of a briefcase. Unfortunately the tape player started going first...there was this girl Denise that I hung out with (anyone who hung out between Ocean Parkway and Brighton 2nd around 1981 would remember seeing her...blonde girl who ALWAYS wore a pink bikini, serious tan, and tattoos.She was probably 17 or 18 at the time) Anyway, she had an on/off boyfriend named Michael, who always reminded me of Charles Manson. He didn't like that Denise and I were friends, so he buried my boom box in the sand, and the cassette never worked properly after that.

I think I kept the boombox until around 1985, when I was living in the city, and it finally gave out.

My other boom box memory is of Crown Heights. I always loved reggae, and found out that there were a bunch of places on Utica Avenue near Eastern Parkway where you could get the latest reggae 12". The first time I went out there was probably 1979 or so, and me and my friend smoked a couple of spliffs before jumping on the train to Utica. We were pretty stoned on the ride, and after we got off the train at Utica, heading for the street, there was a West Indian kid with a ghetto blaster in the train station playing some some serious dub, and the echo in the train station made it sound so trippy that we knew it was going to be worth it to travel "out of our comfort zone", so to speak.