Why do you do what you do?

[Chuck]

I am 56 years old.

Some of my other interests include collecting
and restoring old telephones and the associated
switching equipment. I have a Western Electric
step-by-step telephone exchange operating in my
house. It has 120 working phone lines. Currently there are about 50 phones connected to it and working. It is connected to the outside world via my land line, and part of its purpose in life is to field all incoming calls and so it filters out the telemarketers.

I also enjoy old railroad equipment. I have
in the past been an active operator (motorman)
at East Troy, Wisconsin at the electric
railway museum there. More recently I was
employed as a streetcar motorman in downtown Tampa, FL. operating on their their heritage
streetcar line.

As far as artistic endeavors, I worked as a
mechanical designer for many years and that
stopped when it all went to computers because
that took the fun out of making large drawings
by hand.

Why phonographs? When I was 11 years old in
1967, my dad got down out of the dusty shop
attic my grandfather's old Edison model D
combination 2/4 minute machine, and its box
of 25 records. He had stored that machine away
in 1935. One of those records in that box was
different from the rest. It was brown, it was
cracked, and it had big chunks missing from it.
There was a home recording on it that was barely audible. My grandfather told me that
brown record was a special one he used long ago
to record on.

That idea of the special brown record has stayed with me ever since.

In short, the reason I gravitate toward these
old things is because they come from another time. A time when things were built to last.
A time when there was pride in craftsmanship.
My favorite saying about any of this stuff
is "With reasonable care, it will easily last
400 years"

Chuck