March 18, 2024

The Operator’s Stash

About a year ago I sold a restored tear drop speaker to Eric in Ft. Worth. We messaged back and forth on FB about a few things over time. He told me in August of last year that he would be helping a retired operator sort out all the stuff in his two buildings. I politely asked to be included if the chance came.

Six months later that chance came. It was a pleasant surprise. I’ve sorted through an operator’s left overs several times over the years. I love it! Perhaps it’s a “hunt n gather” type thing. I do know that most people don’t know what they’re looking at when it comes to jukebox parts. I do. Not only that but they miss the significance of small parts. Eric and I made a date for me to come by on the following Saturday. I arrived and we made small talk while getting aquainted. Then I set to search. I spent a couple hours looking through everything and came away with a Honda Civic car load! I had several SHP and TSA amplifiers, DCC’s, a box of DCC boards, black and gray boxes used in the Microlog jukes, amp boards, vacuum tubes, electronic components, cartridges and needles, a wonderful Sencore Capacitor tester, single and dual credit units, loads of new electrolytic capacitors in bags of 100, scores of valuable output transistors, even a power transformer for a TSU receiver. While looking the old operator came by and sat around awhile. He looked so familiar. I’m sure we ran across each other back in the day. He hated seeing his business slowly go away. He was too old to do anything and accepted this fate. I guess we all do. He made mention he was going to lunch soon so I dawdled over things. I did not want the operator to be around when it came time to set a price. They usually think everything regardless of age is worth retail. In time he left and I kept searching. I kind of restrained myself to mostly jukebox parts as I just didn’t know what Eric would charge. Come time to settle; I offered $200 and he took it. I was elated. I had literally a car load of good parts. He even mentioned that most everything else was gonna get thrown away. If I saw something grab it. Well, I emptied the shelves of a couple thousand new lamps in packs of ten up to a hundred each.

When I got home I started really sorting through everything. I had even picked up an NOS Electrohome flyback transformer. I have replaced many of these back in the day. The more I thought about what he said about just throwing things away and what I knew I had left behind I contacted him a couple days later and asked if I could come by again. Say next Saturday? He mentioned he had already started throwing things away. I said Please stop! He agreed to both.

A big part of what I do nowadays is sell a lot of parts on ebay. So this time I picked up everything I thought I could sell for profit plus any parts I missed on purpose or not the first go round. I picked up a very nice sturdy tool case. The kind technicians have with 30 tool holder pouches. The kind I could never afford when I was doing service calls. In fact to this day I still use a large tackle box (Plano brand) for a tool box. I got perhaps 30 NOS American locks, all the pinball parts I could find-bags of rubbers, coils, flipper plastics, thumper bumper rings, and targets. Every NOS electronics component in the package I could see-I ended up with a couple hundred vintage electronics pieces. Diodes and transistors mostly. There were thousands of resistors but I stayed away from those-too many, too cheap. I even found several tubes of IC chips, now vintage or obsolete if you tried to buy one. 6800 architecture as used in pinball machines, CPU’s, RAM, ROM’s. Even a fairly large box of Ms Pacman daughter boards, RAM, and IC’s. This is what I meant by knowing what you’re looking at. I have had several Ms Pacs and regular PacMan’s and of course worked on them in detail so this was familiar stuff to me.

As I searched Eric and I got to know each other a bit better. We kept up a conversation throughout. He’s a nice guy who just happened to live next door to this operator while growing up in Ft. Worth. They had sorted through the big pieces; jukeboxes, pinballs, and arcade games in the prior months. He was even ex-Navy just like me and I’ll be darned we were even the same rate. AT or Aviation Electronics Technicians. So of course we started swapping sea stories. I had another literal car load. Trunk, backseat, floorboards, passenger front seat. You’d be surprised just how much a small car can hold. I was. And I gave another $200 for the lot. I’ll end up making a couple thousand out of this haul but I have my work cut out for me. Items have to be sorted, researched, cleaned and then put up for auction. Several things will slowly get rebuilt over the next couple years. I’m thinking the amplifiers specifically. And of course the black and gray boxes. I have zero room at home. I’m full up.

I doubt I’ll ever get to go through another operator’s business. Especially to the degree that I did this time. It’s the same sort of feeling of discovery I would get back in the day when I regularly went to auctions, flea markets, garage sales etc. Picking through the junk for the treasure.