August 2026 eBulletin Now Available

Dear Fellows:

I have a 3.5-inch tall, black RCA part number 110905 45 RPM stacking spindle on my desk. Given the average age of our Fellows, most of you know exactly what I am talking about.

But you may not know its history.

In 1949, RCA Victor unveiled a small but stubborn piece of engineering: the 45 RPM record and the multi-play stacking spindle built to hold it. The spindle’s 1.5-inch center post let a listener load up to ten records at once; as each side finished, the mechanism dropped the next disc onto the turntable below, delivering nearly an hour of uninterrupted music.

The invention did not emerge in a vacuum. A year earlier, Columbia had introduced the 33⅓ RPM long-playing record, and RCA, unwilling to cede the format war, raced out its own answer within months. Rather than simply shrink the existing record formats, RCA built a whole listening system around the 45-rpm disc: a wide center hole, a dedicated changer, and records color-coded by genre — black for pop, green for country, red for classical, orange for R&B — so a shopper could sort a stack at a glance.

But the spindle’s very cleverness became its limitation. It was purpose-built for one job: cycling small vinyl discs through a fixed physical process. Its oversized hole, the feature that made rapid-fire stacking possible, meant a 45 could not sit on a standard record player at all. Turntables eventually shipped with three speeds and a single, slim spindle, forcing RCA’s 45-rpm format to survive on a flimsy plastic adapter snapped into the middle of every disc (a “spider”). The very feature that had made the format distinctive gave rise to a workaround.

As the way we listen to music evolved — to cassettes, to CDs, eventually to a phone in every pocket — the spindle had no way to follow. It could not be updated, retrained, or repurposed. It could only spin the records it was designed for, in the way it was designed to spin them, until no one needed that anymore. Today the RCA spindle survives in collectors’ cabinets and museum drawers: an elegant solution to a problem the world stopped having.

The legal profession does not run on spindles, but it runs on habits, tools, and assumptions that can calcify the same way. What served one’s law practice well for a decade can become obsolete without warning. The lawyers who thrive are rarely the ones who mastered yesterday’s mechanism most completely — they are the ones who keep asking what today’s moment requires.

And that is why I keep the RCA part number 110905 on my desk. It is a constant reminder that I cannot unquestioningly follow or rely on what I have learned over the last forty-five years at the Bar, despite that fact that they have given me a successful career. Rather, I must continue to learn and adapt, be it substantive and procedural law, trial skills, artificial intelligence, or law office management. I have no reasonable expectation — indeed, no right to assume — that the world will wait for me to catch up. The spindle had no choice but to become obsolete, but so long as I have the privilege of practicing law, I intend to keep adapting.

John A. Day
President

To read the August 2026 eBulletin, click here