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Topic: What is your background in 78rpm records? How did you come to collect 78rpm records?

15th Aug 2017, 11:08 PM
	mojofilter Member since Jul 2012 1434 Points	My parents and grandparents had small quantities of 78s stored under their record players, going back to the early 1930s and up to the end of the 1950s. Some of my earliest memories are of listening to them and watching them go around on the turntable. When I was in second grade, because he knew that I was interested in them, the elderly man next door gave me a box of his records that went back to 1904 and were no newer than the invention of the microphone. I still have them. This was my first exposure to gramophone records. I discovered records for cheap at thrift shops before it was a known thing in collectors' circles, and before the people who worked at them thought they knew which ones were valuable and charged accordingly. So I was able to get many, many 78s, some that had been inside paper sleeves or in albums since they were new, for ten cents each. In more recent years, people who knew I was into them have given me their parents' or grandparents' collections - either I would take them, or they would throw them out. Can't have that! A man I worked with, who spent a lifetime collecting 78s and restoring gramophones, who had a big-band radio show for decades, wanted me to have his record collection after he became ill, but I had to decline. [His house was like a gramophone museum. Dozens of them, and they all worked. Cylinder players, Diamond Disc machines...it was unbelievable.] There were so many records, and they (and the shelves to hold them) would have weighed so much, that the concrete slab foundation of my house would have been insufficient to carry the weight. It was an historian's dream, and I couldn't take them, and now he has passed away. I will never find out what happened to them. I will always regret it, but I really could not take them.