Nostalgia - Cassette tapes

Some years ago when I still did the "Finds of the week" posts, I had some called "I'm a collector" in which I shared vintage items. Over time my collections ... no, wait.
I'm not talking about a collection today, it's just something I still have.

I was born in the 60s. I grew up with vinyl records, my father's single collection - we even had one loner that was 78 RPM which was the standard into the 40s, but I don't remember if it was from shellac.
Compact cassettes - usually just called "Kassetten" here in Germany - had first come out in 1963, not long before I was born, and they took a bit to arrive in our household. My brother was the first one to have a cassette recorder with a microphone, my guess is that must have been in the early 70s.
I got my own recorder years later when a school friend gave me her old one for a gift, together with a bunch of home dubbed Beatles cassettes. I will never forget how it drove my mother nuts that I took an hour to dry the dishes, just because I mostly danced around in the kitchen singing along with the Beatles.
There were also cassettes with pre-recorded music - music cassettes, often just MC here in Germany - but I never had one of those myself as I preferred records.
Cassettes also became wildly popular for audio dramas for children, and although the cassette was more or less replaced by CDs and later MP3, it never went away completely and actually made a bit of comeback in the last few years.
You can buy recorders, blank tapes, yes, and even music cassettes. Long live retro! 😜

For "old" people like me, cassettes can of course hold a lot of emotional memories. They were magic because they let us do so many things so easily. They were easy to take along and share music with friends. You could copy music from one device to the other. They were easy to use even for small kids (which could be a disadvantage if you were visiting a friend and then a little dwarf marched in with her chunky yellow/orange recorder proudly making you listen to her latest Benjamin the Elephant story three times, yes, that really happened).

I bet a lot of people remember trying to get the perfect recording from radio hit countdowns and being angry when the presenter once again talked over part of a song you had been desperately waiting for. Some of those tapes were quite eclectic. The music industry, however, wasn't so happy about home dubbing.
Then there were the mix tapes people made for their girlfriends or boyfriends or, in my case, siblings. Actually, I still have one of those, too.
I'm sure I wasn't the only who sat in front of the TV and swore everyone to absolute silence (haha, that worked really well), so I could record a movie. We definitely had "The Wizard of Oz" and "Moby Dick" on tape.
Of course you always had to be careful not to tape over something that you might not be able to come across anytime soon. Or having someone else tape over it. That kind of accident did happen.
Also there was the curse of the tape eating recorders. If you were lucky and the tape wasn't too tangled and crinkled, you could wind it up using a pencil, but if it was, chances were high that the tape would be eaten again. I once had a tape whose crinkled end I had to cut off completely, and because the small plastic peg holding that end had jumped off, I used a bit of a toothpick to replace it. It was such a relief when that worked!

This is my own boombox - which has never been outside because darn, that thing is heavy! - and part of my cassettes. I tried out a few of them and although they are up to 40 years old, one or the other even older, they still worked even if everything is a bit dusty.
If you have a close look, you can see that the Play button is pressed, I listened while taking the picture.

There are a few cassettes that I didn't remember having at all, for example the one in the front saying "Grusel!" = "Creepy!" I listened in a bit and that's exactly what it is, creepy music as if for a movie background. I have never organized a Halloween party myself, no idea how this tape ended up with me, and I don't recognize the handwriting, either.
The one on the left, however, brought back a memory. It's labeled "Beatles (AFN)" and it was a documentary about the Beatles on AFN (Armed Forces Network) radio, probably in the early 80s after John Lennon died. I only recorded the songs because the cassette wouldn't have been long enough for the whole documentary. Yeah, weird, I know.

Do you have any cassette stories yourself?