A Better Life New York
Steve "The Judge" focuses on the art of enjoying yourself through food, fun and frolic. Steve conducts live Interviews on many popular and controversial topics. Steve has candid conversations about fine dining to BBQ, cigars to cars, history making events and everything in between. Recently, we added a special monthly addition ion collecting Antique Phonographs with experts Wyatt Markus, and Collector/Dealers Joe Hough and Tracy McKinney. Sponsored by Premium Botanicals the maker of Herbal Spectrum a line of full spectrum Hemp based CBD products. http://www.mypbcbd.com
A Better Life New York
Part One: Discovering Antique Phonographs: Collecting and Reviving These Early 20th-Century Marvels. My Interview with Wyatt, Joe and Tracy.
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What if a simple visit to an antique store could ignite an unexpected passion? During a rainy day adventure, we uncovered the captivating world of phonographs, transforming a chance encounter with a Victrola 11 into an exhilarating hobby. Join us as we explore this newfound obsession, alongside insights from seasoned collector-dealer Wyatt Marcus and the New Jersey-based duo, Joe and Tracy. Together, we'll uncover the allure of these vintage marvels and the magical community that surrounds them.
Our journey through the phonograph landscape is one filled with romance, restoration, and the rediscovery of early 20th-century life. Experience the joy of bringing forgotten machines back to life, with Tracy's meticulous focus on reproducers and Joe's passion for mechanical repairs. From navigating auctions for the perfect Edison Standard to the camaraderie of FaceTime repairs with fellow enthusiasts like Wyatt, our adventure is as much about the people as it is the machines themselves.
Let us transport you to the Edison National Historic Site, where Edison's legacy comes alive, not just in technology but in the stories told through the records we play. Embrace the charm of Uncle Josh records, and find yourself captivated by the histories each disc holds. Whether you're a seasoned collector or a curious newcomer, this episode promises a heartfelt exploration into a world where history, technology, and community collide in the most enchanting ways.
Hello everyone and welcome back to A Better Life New York. This has been a great journey and, as you and some of you have noticed, this is a new name and it's meant to reflect a little bit more of the changes that have gone. Through our podcast. We've covered more and more subjects. We've covered lots of things that are different than a food and restaurants where we all started out Not that those are going away. We have some great episodes coming up. I have a winery in Italy we're going to do a live video podcast with. We have some great Italian restaurants in this area and throughout New York and we're going to have a lot of food things coming up real soon. I'm hoping that we're going to switch to video. That has been held up, partially because I had COVID and partially the result of my COVID gave me Bell's palsy, so I'm having a little difficulty talking, which you may be very well aware of. Also, it has some results on my visual, my face. So for now, at least for a little while, we're going to continue with the audio and there may be some video coming up real soon because I have some things scheduled so they're going to have to be filmed. Hopefully I'll be a little better and we'll move right along.
Speaker 1:Today is a special episode. It's the beginning of another segment of A Better Life. New York and all of you that are regular listeners of the program know that I collect antique phonographs and I've gotten a lot of requests for more information about those phonographs. And I've gotten a lot of requests for more information about those phonographs. So today's episode that's going to be in two parts. They're both going to be released simultaneously. It's just so long that I'm going to cut it in half, because it's an hour and 20 minutes or an hour and a half, so I'm going to cut it in 45 minutes sections. It's an arbitrary cut, but just so it's not so long. It's with three people I know from the hobby, wyatt Marcus, who is a very learned, distinguished collector dealer out there, collector-dealer out there. He is known for his collecting. He's known for his quality reproducers, which are an important part of an antique phonograph it's the part that converts the grooves into sound and he is known throughout the country and throughout the world as being the best at it.
Speaker 1:You will routinely see people selling machines and them mentioning that Wyatt had rebuilt the reproducer. Also, two collector dealers from New Jersey, joe and Tracy, are a team. Joe works on the mechanics and Tracy rebuilds reproducers. They specialize in more disc than Edison reproducers and they specialized in Xenophones, which are a small segment manufacturer. I actually have a couple and their story is great. We go to our first part. Thank you for listening, and now our interview with Wyatt, joe and Tracy. Thanks for joining us tonight. Wyatt, hello, thank you. And also with him is Joe and Tracy. I admire his ability to find machines, machines, and I love the opportunity to purchase them as well. So welcome as well, Steven.
Speaker 2:thank you very much for that. I think you're way too kind in what you just said right there. So thank you for allowing Tracy and I to be a part of your show.
Speaker 1:I hope we could do more. I think that I get questions all the time in the podcast about antique photographs. I think there's a lot of people. I think this hobby, even though I've only been in it over a little over a year, is incredibly interesting. There's so much to learn and it's great that I have people like you guys that I can learn from. It seems every day there's one thing you learn and would breed 10 more questions that you want to know Certainly Whether it's a person's name, whether a tower machine works, whether the differences in things and why things were built and where they exist. And it's my understanding today you guys went to Edison's house. Is that correct?
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, we went to the edison's house, is that correct? Yeah, uh, yeah, we went to the edison national historic site, which, uh, that's west orange, new jersey. Yes, yes, and joe and I spent, uh, most of the morning touring through the buildings and the collections there and shortly, just to speak about it for a moment, we got to see the first phonograph that Edison and his guys produced in 1877. And I guess I don't know if I really make fun of it, but it changed the world. And there it is, just sitting on a table behind a simple glass panel so you can't touch it, and it has a little placard next to it that says Edison's original phonograph, 1877. And it's so easy to walk by you wouldn't know its significance unless you were like us, unless you collected these machines.
Speaker 3:But anyway, we saw his workshop and then we went up to Glenmont, which is his mansion that he lived in Llewellyn Park, new Jersey, which is just a few minutes around the corner from the historic site. We had a really, really long day and we learned a lot. It was a wonderful experience, it was a sensory experience the smell of grease and old wood and just using your imagination to see Edison and his family living in that enormous house that they had. It was really something special.
Speaker 1:I was there in grammar school and it was in a total disarray and even though it was a national park they didn't have money to restore it and actually it was hillary clinton that helped about the government to to give them money to to fix it up into the condition and that it is now I.
Speaker 2:I was very impressed by just and maybe I should have known this, but it wasn't just the the phonograph that Edison had his fingers in and obviously the light bulb, but there were so many other inventions that he came up with dozens and dozens or hundreds and hundreds. What got him going was with the ticker tape machine, originally when he was 20 or so, and then there was a waffle iron in the lab. He had quite a large R&D lab that was very impressive and basically my understanding, he gave his guys the carte blanche to have at it and so he came up with so many different inventions. But certainly, as Wyatt said, you saw the first tinfoil machine sitting there behind a piece of glass and I agree with Wyatt, it changed the world. Here we are, 120 years later, recording on your podcast.
Speaker 1:It's true, we get it with Wyatt. What got you into this hobby and what possessed you? I don't know the hush of your background, to be honest how you got into this.
Speaker 3:I've been asked that question for many years and it used to start out with it used to be like a 10-minute romantic recitation. My grandmother passed away 20-plus years ago and in her collection of stuff there was a box of 78 RPM records. Now in her house there was an old 1949 Magnavox record player and I put these records because I didn't know anything about Victor Talking Machine and I saw these labels. It said Victor, some of them said Victrola. I didn't know anything about Victor Talking Machine and I saw these labels. It said Victor, some of them said Victrola. I didn't know anything about old records, but this is by complete random act.
Speaker 3:I put one of the records on the Magnavox and I played it and I noticed, okay, there's a little bit of noise there. It doesn't sound right. You couldn't listen to this music that I was hearing. So I remembered and I guess I am giving you somewhat of a long version here that one of my friends. He had in his house a Victrola that belonged to his grandmother, my friend Scott. So I called him up I said do you still have the Victrola? And for your listeners, a Victrola is a floor model windup phonograph that doesn't have a big external horn but it has an internal horn, because the external horn was considered a little unsightly. He said, yeah, we still have the Victrola. My father moved it into the basement. We want to get rid of it. So that's another coincidence that I got these records. I discovered them by accident, I listened to them, just by random act, and he just happens to have this Victrola that they're going to sell.
Speaker 3:And I knew inherently that playing these records on this machine that it would sound authentic because these records were from that same era. So his father showed me the machine. I put my hand on what's called the tone arm, which is the first part of the amplifying system, and it broke immediately. And his father looked up at me and said I guess you just bought it. I said how much? He's 300 bucks. So I bought it, brought it home and I learned to adore the smell of the old oil and grease, the smell of old wood and the opportunity to take something that was broken and to bring it back to life. So I started.
Speaker 3:This is back when the internet of phonographs was in its it was in its infancy. This is the AOL days that we're talking about and I was able to locate various individual hobbyists across the country that made parts for these 90 and 100-year-old machines and I was able to procure the parts, get it playing when I heard my first record being played mechanically and not just winding it up and winding up the clock motor that's in it to turn the turntable. But the reproduction of the record is also mechanical. There's no electrical components in this. You take a steel needle, you put it in a groove, the needle vibrates, it makes the diaphragm vibrate and through the horn that's in it it amplifies the sound. And I was hooked and that led and you asked me how did I get started in this? So I'm giving you the story.
Speaker 3:I started putting ads in the newspaper Wanted Antique wind-up phonographs, cash paid. I started getting calls and I would be buying these old machines. I'd pull them out of basements attics. Individuals would find them in closets. I was buying them and now I'm looking for more parts and in the early internet I found one website and it was a fellow that lived 10 minutes from my house.
Speaker 3:I thought he would be across the country and he provided me with parts for these machines. So I started going to his house once every two months, then it became once a month, then it became once a week, then twice a week, and then he said you're working on these machines all the time. How would you like a job? On these machines all the time? How would you like a job?
Speaker 3:And from there I worked for him for almost six years restoring these machines, learning a lot about them and how to fix them, the techniques and then my obsession became a lifestyle going to shows, meeting people, working on my interpersonal skills, learning how to relate to people, learning how to buy things with confidence and not being a nervous Nelly how much is that Victrola you have in the living room? I don't have much money, stuff like that. And over time I amassed a pretty significant collection of things and then like anything from baseball cards to collecting beanie babies or whatever. There's variation and there's different levels, from the very common to the very rare, and it took me 15 years to figure that all out. And now, 20 plus years later, I'm still finding things that I didn't know existed, and this is what keeps me in this hobby. It's addictive, is what it is. I hope that's a good enough answer for you.
Speaker 1:That is a great answer. I've been in it only a short time, but many years ago, before I even went to law school, so I would have to be in my 30s because I went to law school late in life. I was working as a buyer for Nordstrom's and in short Hills, New Jersey, and I went. There was a display of Edison phonographs that were for sale in one of the stores that had closed and they were ridiculous amounts of money, Like I want to say like an Edison standard at $3,500 or something. So it was a very long time ago and there were other things and I'd become enamored with it. Of course I was about to get married, so I really didn't pass the muster where I could explain buying a $3,500 phonograph or whatever it was, so it never happened.
Speaker 1:I've always been interested in Edison. I grew up in New Jersey. I used to go to the museum all the time. I'd been to the places where he made movies in Fort Lee, I'd been to his warehouse in Fort Lee it's still there and then one day I think it was last July or August, about 15 months ago now I think it was last July or August about 15 months ago now and I saw a New Jersey auction house, Willow. I don't know if you've ever bought anything from there, but I bought a lot of things that's in there recently and it was an Edison standard with a horn and it came with a handful of cylinders and the initial bid was a couple of hundred bucks. I don't remember how much it was exactly and I did the initial bid and I forgot all about it, but nobody else bid on it, so I got it. I went and picked it up. I like cranked it up in the back of the car. I couldn't even wait until I got home. I put the cylinder on and it played.
Speaker 1:It's amazing, even when they're not in good shape, when they're in as-found condition, they still work to some level and I've showed it to so many people like mechanics and things, and they're amazed at the simplicity of the engineering, Amazed at how basic things are and how they still work 120 years later in some instances yeah, it's all cast iron and steel and brass and how they still work 120 years later in some instances.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's all cast iron and steel and brass and the only thing that can rot is the wood. But if it's kept inside it's going to last almost indefinitely.
Speaker 1:And then I realized that the horn was a reproduction, because I learned a little bit. So I saw an auction where they had a real horn, and that auction ended up coming with five other horns. So I said, gee, I have these other horns, I might as well get machines for the horns. Everybody knows this story. So I'm still buying machines for those horns and it just goes on and on it is.
Speaker 3:It's a lifetime pursuit. It's a lifelong pursuit. You're in it. I don't think there's any out for you at this point. You're now part of the fold.
Speaker 1:I think I am definitely in it. There are machines in every room of my apartment. There are machines in my office here. There are machines in my office and I just the only thing there isn't any and there was, but I took them out was in my bedroom. But I have a whole bedroom that's entirely machines and ads on the wall. And I sat in there this morning and someone called me on FaceTime to see how I was. And they go what is that? And I did an hour and a half with two people on FaceTime, went through, gave a story, played a bunch of machines, and people are like I have to come over and see him and I'm like it's amazing. But, joe and Tracy, I know your story is a rather romantic one as well.
Speaker 2:I don't know if I put it that way, Stephen, but I think our story.
Speaker 1:Well romantic in a way that you've turned it into a lifestyle and enjoy it and welcome these kinds of that's perfectly true.
Speaker 4:I think it's romantic because we both like it, whereas most of the time it's one-sided.
Speaker 1:I would agree with you there.
Speaker 2:Tracy and I are very fortunate. We got into the phonograph hobby, if you will, together, and it was by accident. We were living in Charlotte. I had just accepted a new job which would have us moving to New Jersey, where we are still today, and this is during COVID in early 2021. And Wyatt had a story. I'll give you the quick story. But we were living in a little rental house waiting for the movers to show up. We had three dogs, two cats and no furniture, because everything was packed and it was raining and the dogs were driving us nuts. And Tracy said hey, let's get out of here. Have you been antiquing in a while? And I said, no, let's, whatever, let's go antiquing. Next thing, you know, we run into an antique store in Monroe which outside of Charlotte, and Tracy calls me from the other side of the store and says come here and she's standing next to an upright. I didn't know at the time, but she's standing up next to an upright Victrola 11, which is a very basic upright, victor machine.
Speaker 3:Maybe you should explain to these listeners that may not know what an upright is. We use this terminology and words in the hobby and some of your listeners will be like what does?
Speaker 2:he mean it's a phonograph in a box that is about four feet tall.
Speaker 4:Yeah, so it looks like a piece of furniture, more like a intricate cabinet, if you will, and the top will come up on the top and that's where you have your tonearm and where your turntable is. And then, if you open two doors in the front, that is your volume control, if you will, because the horn is internal and when you close the doors it gets quieter. When you open the doors it gets louder, and then below that is an area to store your records. So it looks like basically a fancy cabinet when you look at it, until you open it, which is what I did, and then went. Is this what I think it is?
Speaker 2:And it was yeah, we called the owner over of the antiques store because it didn't have a crank arm on it and we wanted to hear it play. And he came over and put the crank arm in, cranked it a few times, put the needle to the record and Tracy and I were sold. That's all it took. It was that cool of a machine and we knew nothing about them. We just thought, wow, this is neat, it's a piece of history, it looks like a artwork as well, and we got into it at that point in time together. And long story short, we found another little tabletop machine which is just like what I mentioned, what Tracy described earlier, but it's short. And now we had two machines to move to New Jersey and Stephen I think how many we have now, it's probably 70, 80 machines around the house to get it repaired and then showed us his collection.
Speaker 4:And from that point we were pretty much hooked, because we'd never seen a cylinder machine or anything else. So at that point we wanted them all so it's funny.
Speaker 1:You said that because what happened to me was that after I happened to go on facebook and some kid really was a kid, a guy in his like 20 years old was cleaning out his grandmother's house who had just passed away, and he listed a victrola and a basic one I think it's an 80 and that's 80 or whatever it is as basic as he can be for a box and for upright he wanted $200 for it. So for $200, I said, yes, what could it be? I'm not going to get. What do I get burned? 50 bucks, a hundred bucks, what do I care?
Speaker 1:I went down there and he had this old big house in short hills and he goes yeah, my grandfather bought this a hundred years ago and and here it is. I don't know anything about it. It works. Oh, and I got these records and I'll put it in your car. He was a beast of a kid, picked it up, put it in my car, I gave him the 200 bucks and I got out of there as fast as I could and I got it home and I cranked it up and I never did it. I've never done a thing to it.
Speaker 2:It worked perfectly yeah, the the thing that tracy and I we decided we just didn't want to be finding machines. We decided that we also wanted to clean them up, we wanted to fix them, we wanted to repair them getting into tip-top shape. And so Tracy decided she likes to work on the reproducers, which is the small sound box at the end of the tone arm, and I like to do the springs and all the mechanical gearing type stuff. So we not only got into it together, but we also have a little workshop in the basement of the house here and we fix them up for people. And that's how we met Mr Wyatt next to us. He actually bailed me out of a Brunswick repair one evening over FaceTime on my phone while I was struggling trying to get a little Brunswick motor to turn.
Speaker 1:Is that Brunswick to my house now, or is it a different one?
Speaker 2:It could be or it's the ones that's still downstairs, but nonetheless, Wyatt was fantastic. He's the one that said you know what, Joe, just put your phone on FaceTime and show me what's going on, and I didn't scold him.
Speaker 3:I didn't scold him much at all. And yeah, for the uninitiated, if you hear something on this podcast that you don't know about, please email your kind host and he will tell you what a Brunswick is or what any of these other words that we're using. But Brunswick is a make. They made pool tables and they went into the phonograph business and they had a cabinetry shop. So they started making the cabinets and they went forward to make clockwork motors to put in them and they were a contender in the talking machine business.
Speaker 1:So I I love mike brunswick, I and all the machines. I don't have as many as you. I think I have 48 or 49, maybe 50. We can change that? We're working on that. And listen, taxes are due October 15th. After I get past that, I'll be all right, we'll see you on the 16th.
Speaker 1:So it's funny how your favorite or the one you want to listen to just changes. It doesn't matter, it's the most rare. And, frankly, when I first started collecting, a lot of people on Facebook said what do you collect a note for? They're common. I love the common ones, I love them all. They're all pieces of history. The point of having them all is you're telling a historic story. You're going through how Americans, people all over the world, first heard recorded sounds, voices. Think about when the bigger Victors we have, or Victrolas some of them were very expensive at the time, some of the fancy ones, and people were listening to opera. But regular people could listen to opera. They never heard that before. They couldn't afford to go to Carnegie Hall and see an opera because it cost a fortune, you had to dress a certain way. And now in your own home you can hear Caruso Exactly like I hear Caruso today bands or instrumentalists or singers.
Speaker 3:You had to go to your local phonograph dealer and buy the records and bring them home, and records were like 35 cents to 50 cents a piece, which is still a lot of money. And we last night we were I don't know how late it was, it was very late at night we were calculating how much a 100 machine was. And what, joe, what was that? Was it like 1900? Yeah, it was like $3,725 in today's money with inflation, and that is a tremendous amount of money. And one thing that your listeners should know is there wasn't just a hundred dollar model. They made phonographs that were five dollars back then, which was still considerable amount of money. But you could buy an edison cylinder, a wax cylinder record and play it on your five dollar machine or your hundred and five dollar machine. Not only was the music they could purchase whatever they wanted to listen to, but they could also purchase the manner in which you listen to it with small horn, bigger horn if you wanted it louder, or if you wanted a wooden horn because it matched the interior of your house. And, like cars today, you could modify these machines and there was a whole secondary market of companies that allowed you to purchase accessories, because it just can't. You can't just use it with a little 14 inch horn that came with it. You could get a bigger horn, that was more stylish, that sounded better, and they even had volume controls. After market volume controls, you can put it, but it's, this is endless, this is endless.
Speaker 3:And I have friends that are in their 90s that are still in the hobby, and this is such a big subject I can spiral out into seven hours just talking about it, but maybe on another episode in the future, sure, and cover a different aspect of this. But clearly, the three of us I think addiction is a good word, definitely we're addicted to it and it's the hunt, the find, the kill, so to speak, and then bringing it back and taking something that was long silent and bringing it back to life. That's my payback. I do get paid to repair these for people, but my true payment is getting something to sing again. And also when I show the machine to the family this is something else that we were just talking about today on a car ride, getting a machine that a family's owned for decades and decades, or even a hundred years that they've never heard, and play it for them for the first time.
Speaker 3:Or there was this lady. She was in her early eighties. She's owned a machine since she was five. It was in her family and as a five-year-old she knew how to use the machine. A couple months ago she heard it again for the second time in her life and it was long silent. She started weeping. It was a very emotional and personal experience for her, and that was really my payment. It's nice to have the money, of course, but it lacks meaning. But yeah, so it's emotional for me.
Speaker 1:I take pride it comes out in your work right oh yeah, nothing is done. If it isn't done the way it way and you're not happy with it, it's not going to be out there now, that's just my ocd, yeah that's part of the gate. We all know people in this hobby that do things right. Look at john duffy, who makes does the warns all you know that he's a master at it.
Speaker 3:You've seen some of his work and I can't wait to bring him up, and I'm gonna work around my entire collection and bring him to you a couple at a time yeah it's, he's a specialist like I'm, a specialist in the needle head or the reproducer, which is the part that actually takes the physical, the graph, the etching that's in the disc record or the cylinder record, and it takes that mechanical shape and turns it into a sound disturbance that we our minds as music.
Speaker 3:But there are specialists, and when you restore these, like what Tracy and Joe do, a lot of people think, oh, they're just fixing a machine. They don't realize that it's actually a multidisciplinary art. You're dealing with color, furniture refinishing, you're dealing with fabrics, you're dealing with different types of adhesives, chemicals, glues, cleaners, and then, on top of that, you have to understand the principles of operation and how they work. And as soon as you learn the principles of operation, you find that, oh, by the way, there's 500 different companies that made these and each one was a little different and each one has its individual quirks and they all use different parts, and that's part of what creates a lifetime pursuit. But, as you see, I really can talk about this for five hours.
Speaker 1:That's the point, right, that's the point we talked about. But to that point, a woman had a laboratory model and Joe's seen it. I don't know if you've seen it, why it's at Ed's house and I just sold it to him. By the way, he really wanted it. So what was I going to do? And it didn't really come out the way I wanted it, but it plays wonderfully. I had it was shrink wrapped in her basement and the thing weighed a ton. I couldn't even move it. So she had a handyman working on the house, him and I and the woman carried it across gravel and threw it in the back of my car. I didn't think I was ever going to get it out, it was so heavy. So we got it back to my office because I didn't want to bring it home because it was a mess and a dirt. It had mice stuff on it. I took the shrink wrap though, opened it up and it had a hundred discs in it and those discs aren't light.
Speaker 3:The other, oh my god, I don't even know how we got it up to a piece or a pound they're a pound, they're one pound a piece, so you had a hundred pound records plus the machine yeah, the records were a dollar each. Back in the day you went to your dealer with 20 and you came back with 20 pounds of records which is 40 songs.
Speaker 1:So I I have those, so I got those records. It didn't really work, but I I could identify what it was doing. I went on youtube, I searched this issue and who came up? Of course, just plexiginous. And yeah, yeah, he had so many how-to videos, hundreds if not thousand, and it was one exactly about my problem. Yeah, I loosened the screws, I pushed the rod to the position he told me, I tightened it back up, I cranked it up and it worked yeah the that that fellow that steve mentioned his.
Speaker 3:His youtube name is dyslexic genius, because he's a very smart guy, but he is dyslexic, so much. What's so wonderful about these videos? And again, this is part of our ecosystem. He makes videos showing people that may not have mechanical skills, or he's teaching people how to fix their machines, which is wonderful, because this is an old skill set and today people know how to use their iPhone or their Android better than they do a machine. But he's keeping the knowledge alive so these machines can continue singing for many more years, and it's a wonderful thing that he's done.
Speaker 1:And it's a ridiculous collection he has.
Speaker 3:It's delightful. Every time I go there they make me shrimp and grits.
Speaker 1:That's one of my favorite things.
Speaker 3:And then he shows me his latest find and it's really wonderful.
Speaker 1:He not only does, he do demonstrations on how to fix certain things or restoring things for customers, he picks a machine every week and plays music. So you also get to enjoy machines you may never see, depending on who you are and where you go.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's one area of the hobby that Tracy and I are getting more into, and that is actually listening to the records. We got into the hobby, more intrigued with the machines, the beauty of the machines themselves, that we are now trying to come up to speed on all the various types of records cylinders, discs we're going by our ear which one sounds the best, and we have hundreds of disc records and probably a hundred or so cylinder records and we're trying to prioritize them and sort them and see which ones we like and then learn more about them. That's the next stage of the maturation of our hobby. Yeah, that's a whole another can of worms.
Speaker 4:Right there is the people that know the records. Like joe said, we listen to them and play the ones we like, and we do play our machines quite often, but at christmas there there's Christmas records on pretty much every machine and we walk around the house and play different machines to get different sounds and different records. But there are people that are extremely knowledgeable, wyatt being one of them, that can just tell you a record and the number. And it's pretty amazing when it comes to that end of the hobby, which is a whole other wheelhouse that we have not quite gotten into, but we're slowly dipping our toe in it, because it is nice to know the history of the records, not just the machines themselves.
Speaker 3:You start to get deep into it. It's like those young children that can rattle off every president of the United States going back to Washington, or the people that can tell you, oh what is it?
Speaker 2:What's the other thing?
Speaker 3:that, oh, the plot of a Legos movie. There's a certain type of I'm going to say the word there is in some instances, and most instances there's a diagnosis that goes along with the person like myself that obsesses over this. We were going through records the other night, for example, and one of I think Joe or Tracy said oh, Silent Night, oh, that's record 1606, recorded in 1912 or 1913. And they're like what's wrong with you? We were separating the I call it the good records from the bad. The bad ones are actually still good, but they're just not fun to listen to for most people.
Speaker 3:And I've just gone down that rabbit hole to finding out who these long dead performers are, what type of music, what genre of music I want to listen to, and again, it's one of those. It's an obsession. I can say that legitimately. It's an obsession for me, the music. So I have people all the time they say, oh, I found this record by this guy named Kel Stewart who's that? And I'll be like oh, he was a performer, he recorded for multiple labels, he did rural comedy and what's wonderful about Uncle Josh Records is that he talks like a rube or a country person from a high grass town in the middle of nowhere and he talks about these subjects that we don't think about today. And one of his more famous records was Uncle Josh, which was his character, and the automobile. And I'll just take a moment just to say that it was a commentary on how a small town reacted when they saw their first car, and it wasn't a buggy with a horse in front of it. It made noise, it made popping noises, it went at speed down the road, it made a ruckus and it upset the farm animals. And four minutes of this storytelling and it's entertaining, it's charming and you get pulled in to the stories, you get pulled into the music, you get pulled into everything.
Speaker 3:I say this with conviction. There is something out there on an antique record for everybody. If you like opera, we've got it. You want to listen to a banjo? Great, there's thousands of banjo records. If you just want talking. One of the things that I do is home recordings. They sold home recording equipment back then and you could sit around with your family and make a record and play it back. So it introduced magic into the household for just a few dollars and we still do it today. I push recording pretty hard onto people as an activity they can do for joy. See, I birdwalk a lot, so you might have to hold your hand up and make a stop sign so I can see on the screen. Otherwise it's going to be another hour.
Speaker 1:No, I don't care, I could turn it into two parts, that's not a problem, enjoying the conversation. We never spoke like this before, so we're always seeing each other or talking for five minutes on text or in messaging on Facebook. So it's nice to talk about things that we all. I spent time with Joe. I've been with Pacey a couple of times, but we all have that. We all have that gene. I like buying machines from people who had them in their lives from when they were a child, across generations. It's preserving the history.
Speaker 3:This was a time from its inception in 1877, if you will, into the beginning of radio is really where we sit right, where the only recorded music and voice were phonographs and they were the center of everyone's existence and as an interesting side note and I'm just going to go back to William Jennings Bryan and Theodore Roosevelt, president Taft, there were presidents that made recordings on cylinder records back then, and if you were again in a town far off Teddy.
Speaker 3:Roosevelt as well. Yeah, you could hear both sides of the conversation, the political conversation. You would have to pay a penny to go into a business and they would play the Democratic. You would have to pay a penny to go into a business and they would play, you know, the democratic argument. And then you would go into another room to listen to the Republican argument. And it was. It had it played a role in spreading ideas, which that's another. They are. These are talking machines.
Speaker 3:The word phonograph was actually an Edison term, but whenever I write the word phonograph down, I always make it with. I write it with a capital P, but the term is talking machines In the American. Is it vernacular? Is that the right word? That's the right. A lot of people for the last 45, 50 years have been saying victrola. They see anything with a crank sticking out of the side and they crank it and they call it oh yeah, that's my great-grandmother's victrola, but it may be an edison or a machine made by my columbia or anything like that. So you have the cultural significance, the political significance, the political significance, the entertainment significance.
Speaker 3:But also for people that did home recordings, you're preserving memories. There was no tape back then. You didn't have an iPhone or anything like that. And when I had children, when I had two young children we sat around the phonograph and we made a cylinder and the kids were five and six and a half years old and we just I wrote a script they could both read and we made a two minute record. I still have that record today. It's now 14 years later and I can still play it and I can still hear their little voices and remember the day that we recorded it together.
Speaker 3:And every once in a while, when you're out buying records, sometimes you'll come upon a home recording. I came upon a dozen home recordings from the year 1900, and they were made over the course of two years. It was a big family getting together on Christmas Day and singing Christmas songs, and the hair just stood straight up on the back of my neck. You're dealing with one of the more important aspects of the talking machine their ability to be a time machine. It only works in one direction, but I can record something today and if you take really good care of the record, in 100 or 150 years, someone else in the future can play it back and hear me and whatever I have to say. So that's part of the magic of these things your chair, your kitchen table or your bed, your antique bed frame, doesn't talk. But for just a couple hundred or a couple thousand bucks you can get one of these really neat machines and get entertained by whatever you find. And it's wonderful, I love it.
Speaker 2:I love it a lot, so one thing for the listeners.
Speaker 4:most of you know what a record is. We talk about records, discs and cylinders. Cylinders is something we weren't familiar with when Joe and I started. If you imagine, this is going very basic. Take a toilet paper roll. Imagine you have two days of toilet paper left on it but it's made out of wax. That's what a cylinder looks like. It's a wax round record in the shape of a toilet paper roll, if you will, just to give you a visual. And that's what they recorded on, and Wyatt here does recordings on them to this day and does demonstrations which are amazing, and that's what a cylinder is. So if you hear us talking about a cylinder, it is different than a record. It is not flat like the common day record that you would imagine today. It is a round cylinder.
Speaker 1:That's the end of part one, the next episode where we continue our conversation with Wyatt, Joe and Tracy. Thank you for listening. We look forward to your comments and questions. Thank you again.
