Old newspaper articles about collectors & other phono topics

[AmberolaAndy]

Indiana Collector: September 10, 1987

[AmberolaAndy]

An article about R.J. Wakeman? : April 7, 1973

[MordEth]

Retiree just loves his old phonographs

By LEE GERHART
For The Evening Press

If his ear ever tires of the heavy metal music on the radio, Everett Hayden, 70, has a wonderful option: He can go upstairs in his Muncie home, crank up his granddaddy Victrola that has a horn like an ear trumpet and listen to what is perhaps his all-time favorite song, “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum.” It was sung first by Al Jolson in a movie of 1933.

Hayden knows the lyrics as well as the worn record itself does. The track on the ancient Regal was laid down by a forgotten singer named on the label as Jack Kaufman.

I went to a house and knocked on the door.
Out came a lady who said “You’ve been here before.”
Hallelujah, I’m a bum …

“Years ago I used to sing this at the factory, and the boys would get the biggest bang out of it,” chuckles Hayden, who retired 2½ years ago after 12 years at what was then the Detroit Diesel Allison plant. Before that he worked at Owens-Illinois Glass Co. 37 years until the Muncie plant closed.

The venerable B1 Type Victrola manufactured by Victor Talking Machine Co. at Camden, N.J., is one of three precious phonographs that Hayden and wife Mary have acquired.

“It just shines when you pohsh the brass,” says Hayden of the quaint Victor. He remembers paying $65 for it at an estate sale in Redkey long ago because “I made up my mind that I was going to have it.”

Two other relics came to the Haydens as even better bargains. One of these is their 1890s Graphophone with cylinder and stylus. This was discovered by the Haydens’ son, Everett R. {Butch) Hayden, and his family 18 years ago after the younger Haydens took over a fine old home in Huntington from an elderly brother and sister who had to enter a nursing home. Butch gave his discovery to the parents. “We didn’t know what the thing was at first,” they admit.

The Graphophone rotates wax cylinder records under a needle and is ancestor of the phonograph, perfected by Thomas A. Edison, which plays flat records.

A 1955 book authored by Roland Gelatt explains the Graphophone: It was invented in 1881 as a device to record dictation.

Employers bought some of the Graphophones and entrusted them to their stenographers — in the 1880s they were men — and these men well recognized they could be displaced by the machines. The stenographers told their bosses the Graphophones were no good; this, of course, was not the whole truth.

An “unsung genius” in 1890, according to Gelatt, discovered that the Graphophone could be converted to coin-in-the-slot entertainment devices. Soon the Graphophone was adapted for homes as well.

In the late 1890s thousands of Graphophones, including the one the Haydens possess, rolled out of American Graphophone Co.’s factory in Bridgeport, Conn.

The Haydens play a wax cylinder on their instrument. It’s a narrative record, “Uncle Josh and the Lightning Rod Agent.” There is considerable scratchiness and then out of the mists of more than 80 years comes the voice of a monologist named Cal Stewart. He tells about a rustic Uncle Josh who was pressured by a hard-sell salesman into buying lighting rods for every building on his farm. Then somehow Uncle Josh lost everything in a disaster anyway.

“Bought for a song” … That phrase could be coined to describe the bargain represented by their honestly made-in-Muncie floor­model phonograph, dubbed the “Wilsonola” by its makers, the Wilson & Sons Piano Co.

The 1919-1920 Muncie city directory lists the Wilson piano firm at Rochester Avenue and the Big Four Railroad tracks, but the firm drops out of notice in later directories.

Disappearance of Wilson, at least as a phonograph maker, may be explained by University of Toledo authority Robert A. Chipman, who wrote:

“The commercial history of the phonograph after 1895 is one of the most chaotic in the annals of modern industry. Hundreds of companies appeared and disappeared…”

Hayden believes the cabinet of his Wilsonola is of dark oak. All is intact except a little collar to separate the windup crank from the wood. He keeps his model gleaming, and the machine must be as handsome as the day it came out of the plant FOB Muncie.

The nameplate in front of the turntable shows the company’s initial letters scrambled into a logo and a slogan, “The name carries the conviction of quality.”

The Wilsonola is a trophy from an auction at Upland 20 years ago when the auctioneer announced the Wilson phonograph and its Muncie origin. Unaccountably, no one yelled bids. When the auctioneer called, “Who will give $10?” Hayden shouted, ”I will.”

Another treasure is in the storage hold of the Wilsonola. This is the old records tucked in the storage cabi­net that came along with the machine. A record collector would have a smorgasbord seeing the pageant of forgotten labels: Domino, Regal, Lincoln, Paramount, Tops, Cameo, Pathé. One of the labels is that of Richmond, Ind.'s Gennett.

Chicago jazz musicians used to spend a day on the train to cut their records in the Gennett waxworks at Richmond.

On a Banner label appear the Original Indiana Five singing “My Melancholy Baby.” The Hoosier Hot Shots of half a century ago are represented on another disc, “Meet Me Tonight in the Cow Shed.”

The Hoosier Hot Shots’ cowbells may have rung with a Muncie area accent because one, Gabe Ward. hailed from Alexandria, and two others, Ken and Hezzie Trietsch, came from Cowan, according to Press columnist Dick Stodghill, a long-time Hotshot fan.

Stodghill has corresponded with Ward in Oregon and believes Ken Trietsch is living in Southern California, and Hezzie is deceased.

Everett Hayden has a memory for things other than “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum,” which was composed by Rodgers and Hart as title song for a Jolson movie of 54 years ago. Hayden can quote verbatim passages from Longfellow’s “Hiawatha” and Riley‘s “When the Frost Is on the Punkins” that he memorized while in the fourth grade of the now erased Sycamore School in Mount Pleasant Township.

[image]

A “HALLELUJAH” CHORUS, BUT IT ISN’T HANDEL’S…

Everett Hayden sings an old Al Jolson number, “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum,” for wife Mary in tune with the music coming from the amplifying horn of an ancient Victrola. The Haydens possess three precious vintage record players. One is shown above while another is a Wilson & Sons phonograph manufactured by a firm once located on Rochester Avenue, off West Memorial. —Evening Press photo.

[MordEth]

[image]

Collector Joe Wakeman artangcs some of his antique phonographs. Left to right are an Edison Home (cylinder) phonograph, circa 1903; a 1902 Victor Royal; 1906 Edison Standard; 1903 Zon-O-Phone, and 1908 Edison Home.

Sounds of Yesteryear

By Barbara Hooker
Bee Statt Writer

DAVIS — The “Original Night Hawks” play “Red Hot Mama” in the dining room, and in another part of the house, Enrico Caruso, Geraldine Farrar and Nellie Melba gasp out the highs and lows of “La Boehme.”

It’s all recorded music, of course. The scratchy sounds of yesteryear, not the sterophonic, sound­chamber perfected harmonics we know today.

The records are as old as Grandma and some look like the rolling pin she used. Others are disc rexordings with faded labels from the days when a Victor “Red Seal” was a status
symbol.

Spinning these old tunes are 60-to 80-year-old phonographs with names like “Graphophone,” “Gramophone,” “Zon-O-Phone” and “Victor Talking Machine.”

THESE GHOSTS of the past fit well in a musty two-story home rentcd by Davis bachelor Joe Wakeman lo house his valuable collection of 70 antique phonographs and seven old radios.

All his phonographs except five are different. Joe has more than 2,000 records, too, In luding a couple of hundred cylinders.

Most of the old phonographs have exterior horns made of shiny brass or hand-carved oak, sticking up at straight and stately angles or arching gracefully like swans’ necks.

THEY SIT about the house on old pieces of furniture like people wa1ting for something to happen. And from the dining room wall, 1910 Edison light bulbs glow like alert but aged aunts still in charge of the household.

To his knowledge, Wakeman’s collection is among the largest in Northern California, but it lacks some of the very earliest models — battery-powered phonographs invented about 1890 by Thomas Edison.

Not many of these were made, Wakeman says.

His group represents the early phonograph period starting five years later when the first major sound companies — such as Edison, Berl1ner and Columb1a came out with models powered by spring motors.

“PHONOGHAPHS began to sell then. They weren’t commercially successful until the heavy batteries were replaced by light­weight springs," says Wakeman, a University of California plant pathology technician.

In mechanical acoustics, he relates, sound is carried by vibrations from the record groove through the stylus or needle to a silver­dollar sized diaphragm and up the neck of horn where it is amplified.

“It doesn’t compare to electronically amplified sound,” he says, but to people in those days, it was revolutionary.”

Wakeman’s most valuable piece is a circa 1903 (disc-style) Zon-O-Phone that greets visitors from its perch on a small table, in the foyer. He bought it for $45. and says he ould receive $200 today.

“ZON-O-PHONES were manufactured in violation of the Victor Talking Machine Company’s patents,” he explains. “Emile Berliner invented the disc phonograph in the early 1890’s and held an 18-year right to the patent.” The Berliner Gramophone Co. became the Victor Talking Machine Co. about 1901.

The “patent wars” of the early phonograph era “baffled the courts,” Wakeman likes to recount. “The Columbia company had better lawyers than scientists so they ‘borrowed’ many ideas from Edison, Berliner and later, from the Victor firm.”

The Disc Graphophone, produced about 1901 by Columbia, was similar to the Berliner Gramophone — and the confusion of the terms was a problem even then, he says.

BUT WITHIN a few years, a new, “respectable” “Victor Victrola” was marketed by the Victor Talking Machine Co. This upright period-style cabinet with the horn inside and out of sight became an overnight sensation, Joe says.

“Women didn’t want those dang-fangled other things around with the horns sticking out and cluttering up the place. They were an eyesore,” he relates.

The public quickly gave the nickname “Victrola” to all subsequent similar models made by other companies, even though Victor Co. had a copyright on the name.

Thus, even today, the Edison Amberola, Edison Diamond Disc Phonograph and the Columbia Graphonola — all cabinet models with enclosed horns — often are incorrectly called Victrolas.

WAKEMAN estimates he’s spent about $1,500 to amass a collection now worth three to four times that much. He once forked over $250 for a Columbia (cylinder) Graphophone with a lyre-shaped stylus carriage.

But money isn’t the whole story of a collecting old recorders. Hours have been invested cleaning, repairing and searching out cabinets and parts. A real “find” is seldom intact, the collector says.

Collecting old phonographs and records only works, he warns, if the hobbyist knows what goes with what. “Early disc records came in seven varieties and the cylinders in five,” he notes. “If you don’t know what machine takes which kind of record, you can ruin the record or the stylus.”

BECAUSE MOST of his records are irreplaceable and he likes to hear them often, Joe uses special “soft sound” extra thin steel styluses that are easier than conventional needles on the old discs.

That way, he can plop down anytime in an ancient overstuffed chair and idolize Luisa Tetrazzini and Adlina Patti from the Golden Age of Opera … or float away on the strains of “Tell Me Dreamy Eyes” from the piano of Zez Confrey … or tap his foot to the snappy sounds of Harry Raderman’s Jazz Orchestra playing “Make That Trombone Laugh” … or to hundreds of other tunes of a bygone era.

Joe Wakeman can entertain himself all night without getting out of the Roaring Twenties.

[image]

In the background are an Edison Amberola and Edison Maroon Gem, all displayed atop a Silvertone console photograph. In the front are a 1903 Zon-O-Phone and 1903 Edison Standard cylinder phonograph.

Bee Photos

[AmberolaAndy]

Thanks for your transcriptions MordEth!

California collector: June 28, 1953

[AmberolaAndy]

British Columbia collector: January 12, 2002

[AmberolaAndy]

North Carolina collector: October 24, 2001

[VanEpsFan1914]

Hey! That's the local club in North Carolina!

[AmberolaAndy]

An ad for a Miami store Called Jordan Marsh: December 17, 1969

A Player Piano with an 8-track deck?

[AmberolaAndy]

An ad for the VTLA from a local (to me) music shop in Omaha.

December 24, 1909 (I believe the VTLA became the XVI around this time?)