I had long since forgotten about this, but looking back now, I not only remember them but actually recorded one once. But in a weird twist of fate, I never got to hear it. 

"Them" were recording booths that were located at fairs and other places that would allow you to go into a booth, put some coins in a slot and record you saying or singing whatever you wanted for about two minutes. After a short wait, an actual one sided 45 RPM record would come out the slot and you could either save it for yourself or snail mail it to a loved one or a friend. 

Today we have email, texting, MP3s and other modern marvels. Back then, outside of a phone call, this was one of the only ways to get your voice heard and preserved for posterity

"This literal form of voice mail became popular in the 1930s, with machines like Voice-O-Graph booths once common around the world. People paid a small fee to record their message, and within minutes, the machine popped out a vinyl record — and sometimes an envelope to mail it. Recipients played them on home gramophones, common in the first half of the 1900s."

As for my brief experience with this technology, I was a little kid on vacation with my family in Miami in the late 60s or early 70s, when I spotted the record booth. I had to make one! So my dad and I went into the thing, closed the door, he put the money in the slot and I proceeded to have two minutes of completely unhinged yapping, saying hi to friends back home at school and more nonsense. 

Before the record came out, you had the chance to listen to it in the booth and then the disc appeared. But something weird happened to my one and only vinyl appearance. When we got the thing home and played it, I heard some guy singing a strange tune. I don't who he was or what he was cronning, but it definitely wasn't what I put on disc that day. 

We finally figured out that somehow the machine malfunctioned and gave out the 45 that the previous occupant had made. Which means somewhere, there's a recording of a very young RadioActive babbling on about nothing (some things never change!) that someone got instead of what they recorded!

Voice notes on vinyl records? It used to be all the rage