Cody and the Credenza of Sorrow

[Cody K]

Hi Folks! I'm new here, name is Cody. I joined about a week or so ago, thinking I was gonna need to ask a lot of questions about the Pathé Actuelle I'd just got. Instead of jumping right into the forums with questions that might have already been discussed, I'd thought I'd do a search on "Actuelle". The search feature is excellent, and I found lots of information about the Actuelle. I learned a lot from everyone who wrote in the various Actuelle threads, and, sincerely, thank you. And special thanks to John M., who resolved the confusion I was having from not knowing that to switch from sapphine to lateral, you have to turn the needle chuck, not just the frame.

Over the past 24 hours or so, the forums here have also been the main source of information for my Crash Course in Credenza. That search feature rocks! Here's the story:

Yesterday, while I was idling away the afternoon compulsively checking Craigslist for whatever might be there, I ran across a picture in an ad headlined simply "Antique Furniture". (I saved it, but can't seem to figure out how to post it from my desktop, so here's a link to the ad, though it won't be visible forever):providence.craigslist.org/atq/4100973438.html

Everything in the pictures is pretty average until you get to Picture #8, where, way off to the left, is what looks like a... Naw, couldn't be... Although the ad does mention a "phonograph player"... ?

So I call the seller. Does he happen to know, offhand, what kind of phonograph it is? No, but he'll look at it tomorrow morning when he's down at the warehouse it's in, and he'll call me.

At this point I'm thinking, okay, maybe it's a clone of some kind, or I'm reading the picture wrong entirely, and the phonograph he mentioned is a broken-down off-brand off in a corner that didn't make it into the pictures. Or maybe I'd oughta get busy.

I actually don't think I'd ever seen a Credenza in person, though I've heard all the legends. But that dark thing in the picture sure looked like one.

I'd asked him where he'd got all the items he was selling -- they all kind of fit together, old, dark furniture, like they came from the same place. He'd bought an old house on some acreage, he told me, and torn it down, and these were some of the things that had been in it. And what would he want for the phono?

"A couple hundred bucks."

With that I was off and running -- pictures running though my head of a dark old house, inhabited for decades by an old couple (lately deceased) who had been young in the twenties, au fait and well-off enough to buy the best -- a Credenza! -- but whose fortunes had declined as they aged, and nothing about the house had changed since their hey-day, except maybe that the roof was collapsing...Of course this was their Credenza!

So I stayed up late reading everything here and elsewhere that pertained to the Credenza: troubles with pot metal, bun feet, and ball bearings, and how to fix them. By three a.m., I was ready to commit to whatever the machine might need.

The seller called me this morning right when he said he would.

"It's a Victrola."

"So it's that big thing on the left in the picture?"

"Well, yeah."

"Does it work at all?"

"Well, I don't know, I haven't plugged it in."

"Oh...so it's electric?"

"Well, yeah."

I'm cool with that. I'd prefer to crank, maybe, but whatever -- it's a Credenza!

I made an appointment for mid-afternoon. Packed up the requisites: painter's tape, bubble-wrap, moving blanket, tape measure. Sped down 95 with Rudy Vallee playing in my head:

Oh how long it took me to learn/Hope is strong and tides have to turn... ("Weary River", 1929)

I'll tell ya, I was driving down that highway thinking, things have been pretty brutal for me the past few years, and within three weeks I find an Actuelle and a Credenza? Talk about tides turning! Luck is smiling upon me! Clearly I must be the unacknowledged King of Finding Things on Craigslist, because, really, what more could I need than an Actuelle for acoustics and verticals and a Credenza for delicious VE's? (Except, of course, many, many more records -- and needles, lots and lots of needles.)

So I'm pretty excited. I get to the place, talk to the seller -- a really nice guy -- about the '32 Packard Eight he's restoring in the next bay, and in a minute we go over to the bay where the furniture is.

I see it right away. The cabinet looks much better than in the picture. I lift the lid almost reverently, and then

ACK!

From the looks of things, 'round about 1940, somebody decided the Best Thing That Could Be Done would be to remove every vestige of the hand-crank era and replace it with modern electrical equipment -- everything original is gone, replaced with Radio-Shack-Level electronics -- a cheesy deco tone-arm and I don't know what-all else. 'Round back, no vestige of a horn, or anything else that could at least give a reason to attempt to restore the poor thing. The, uh, fabric was still pretty nice, though. Maybe a couple small holes.

I told the seller what the situation was, and he offered to sell me the cabinet for twenty-five dollars. Maybe I should have taken it (instead I bought a bunch of needles that were in the case for ten), I imagine I could have found someone eventually who had the guts and needed a good cabinet. But really, after a night spent dreaming of lovingly replacing ball-bearings and lubricating the lid closure, I couldn't. First of all, the darn thing's big. And second, how long could I take it standing in whatever corner it was consigned to...just standing there, mocking me and my puny mortal dreams?

But anyway, if anybody wants a nice Credenza cabinet cheap, there it is in the ad, as long as the ad exists.



Thanks to so many of you on this forum for sharing a lot of information with me recently that I've needed regarding bit the Actuelle and the Credenza. I've been out of the game of collecting phonographs for many years until recently, and I really appreciate this board for helping to re-awaken my interest. I hope you know that your discussions, though mostly intended for "internal review" are also really helpful to people like me who run across you all while looking for general information. And I hope to be able to contribute something useful to discussions along the way.Terrific bunch of people here!

[marcapra]

Interesting story! Yes, the fun is in the hunt! Next time, the way you post an URL is to first type or paste the URL in your post. Then you highlight it with your mouse. Then you click on URL above and you have created a link. You clicked on URL first, then pasted your address on.

[schweg]

Cody, A great story, I could almost hear the music in the background building to a crescendo! and then the disappointment. I think we all could share stories like yours. I called the one that was at a local auction a Crudenza since it was in similar condition to the one you describe.

Don't stop looking though, there's plenty of great machines out there to be found..

Steve

[Player-Tone]

Great story, too bad it was an "updated" Credenza.

-Speaking of craigslist sorrow, I found a nice original VV-VTLA Pooley flat-top Victrola that had just recently sold for $500 -If only I checked CL sooner!

Oh well, at least somebody got an awesome deal. Keep up the hunt, you never know when it will be your turn.

[Cody K]

I appreciate the tip, marcapra -- feel like I shoulda known that. I wasn't sure anyway what the feeling is around here about hot-linking CL ads outside the section specifically for hot tips, so when it failed, I figured I'd leave it alone and anyone who really wanted to could cut and paste. Assuming it is okay, though, I'll try it http://providence.craigslist.org/atq/4100973438.html again.

Had to post the story last night because I just couldn't get it out of my mind. Lifting that lid and seeing the carnage was just a shock! I thought I had prepared for the worst -- a nine-slot reproducer with a shattered back, a major horn problem maybe, or random missing parts -- I went in there with visions of spending many hours this coming winter giving that Credenza a loving restoration, slowly and carefully bringing it back to full original glory, no matter what it needed. Didn't care how bad it was, it was a Credenza, one I could actually afford!

What I wasn't prepared for was opening the lid and finding that there was nothing left to restore! I looked at it thinking, well, if at least the horn's there, there'd be some vague chance that I could find the mechanism one part at a time and piece it back together over the next fifty years or so. But there was just no there there.

The vandal was probably some teenager swept up in the electronics geekery fad of the 'forties and 'fifties. I had cousins who used to do this sort of thing back in the 'sixties. Probably it was done at point when the Victrola would have been seen as hopelessly out of date -- not being electric, and all -- and what was done was considered an improvement. The huge irony is that the machine was still set up for 78s, and there is no way that the cheap 10-inch speaker they had replaced the horn with could ever have provided them with anything even approaching the Orthophonic sound. Just Sad.

Thanks, folks, for your shoulders to cry on. I'd actually love to hear some other stories like this.

(And schweg, "Crudenza". I love that. Comines the best of the worst of both crude and cruddy.)

[Moooperator]

I bought a 8-30 at auction once that looked okay. The tone arm was removed but still with the machine. When I got it home I opened the back and all the cast iron connections from the tone arm hole to the horn was gone. Now why would someone do that? I always wonder what was the situation that led to some of the crazy things done to machines.

[Cody K]

That's an odd one, Moooperator. I remember being told about forty-five years ago by a WW1 veteran that lots of old external-horn machines met their end during the war when their metal parts were harvested for collection drives. The wooden parts either went into the trash or into the stove, he said. I mentioned how many old iron sewing machines were still around. He said they were too essential in many homes to part with. (The conversation had begun when he expressed surprise that anyone -- that would be me -- would want to pay $25 for an Edison Home.)

I wonder if maybe your 8-30 met a similar fate during metal drives in WW2?

By the way, I owe you a thank-you for your Actuelle videos on YouTube. Watching them closely really helped me during my getting-acquainted period with my own machine.

[marcapra]

That has happened to most phonograph collectors and you learn quickly to ask more detailed questions. I once bought a Schubert Edisonic on Ebay for $500 and had it shipped to me for another $500. When it arrived, I was shocked to see that it didn't have its legs! The pics of it on Ebay were taken from above at a very high angle so you couldn't see the legs. When I contacted the seller, who was just an antique dealer selling the phonograph for an old lady, he said he had no idea that it originally had legs. It was too expensive to return, so lesson learned: Buyer Beware! Marc.

[Moooperator]

True. You can never have too many photos when it comes to sight unseen purchases. And many times if it looks like they purposely avoid taking a photo of a certain area of a machine then you need to insist on a photo of that area because something will be wrong there most of the time.

Cody, glad my Actuelle youtubes helped. I love mine. I bought it in TX and the guy said it was his grandmothers and after his mom passed away no one in the family wanted it so he had it shipped from Indiana just to end up selling it to me for a very low price. My buddy Don collected it for me near Dallas and stored it until I could make a trip through there! Thanks again Don!