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.

Rebates I Have Known

What do I mean by a rebate? Broadly speaking, a rebate is a sum of money that is credited or returned to a customer upon completion of a transaction. In the coin-op business it is always money left in the machine. When I find money in a jukebox I buy I like to refer to it as a rebate. I have known many, some what you would expect and a couple of spectacular ones. Today I’ll cover the jukeboxes.

Working for Williford Music in the mid 80’s I repaired a lot of dollar bill validators used by Seeburg, the DBV2. It occurred to me one day that there might be bills that did not fall into the cashbox. These were simple validators and there was a pretty big gap between the drop chute and the coin box. I unscrewed one of the 12″ bass speakers from the cabinet bottom of the juke I was working on and looked and sure enough there were a couple of dusty dollar bills at the back. Anything in the coin-op business that doesn’t make it into the cashbox were called floaters and fair game. There would also be coins that usually fell to the back wall as we transported these on a tilted furniture dolly. I learned to look under the thick scratchy insulation Seeburg liked to lay in the “bass box” as well. I like finding money!

I happened to think about the subject after buying a couple of jukeboxes lately and finding modest amounts of money in them. These were jukes bought to part out. One of them, a 1971 Bandshell, had several dollar bills and a large handful of quarters inside the bass speaker box in addition to a full load of records. There was a service tag on the back naming South Dallas Vending as the operator. I used to know this cat in my early days and can’t remember his name for nought. He was a good guy. He owned several small businesses in addition to the vending and music. I had repaired jukeboxes for him and at times bought a jukebox, Seeburg of course, from him. I’d visit occasionally whenever a service call placed me close enough and we’d shoot the bull. One day he called and asked if I wanted to buy all of his Seeburgs. Of course! This happened fairly often. People got to know me and that I worked on Seeburgs. In the mid to latter 90’s the Rowe and Rockola CD boxes came into their own. Seeburg was long gone as a business and no one ran them anymore. So, operators that had any would call and I’d buy what they had left. Incidentally that load of records from the Bandshell had a lot of blues records that I culled and put into the old restored Console model I keep in the dining room. It is my blues box. Still trying to fill it up. It holds a hundred records and I’m close.

Early on after I went into business for myself about 1988 I started learning about antique jukeboxes. Restoring them was a big booming profitable business. I learned of a 1930’s machine for sale and went off to see about it. This would be my first antique jukebox! I arrived at an old house with a small cluttered yard on a sunny day. I went to the porch and knocked. And knocked. The door was a fancy full glass door and I could see no one in the front room. Eventually a really old lady appeared and was walking to the door taking about six inch steps. When she answered I announced why I was there and she directed me to the back yard. I met her husband, an equally old man much spryer than his wife. I looked at the jukebox and it was definitely a 30’s juke. I don’t remember the brand though. We struck a deal, it wasn’t much, a hundred or less. The last thing I asked him was if he had the keys to the twin cashboxes at the top sides. He did not. I loaded my prize and off I went.

I stopped by the old Gottlieb distributor at Hall Street in Dallas to visit with John Shaddick, the finest Rockola man ever and a good friend, and really to show the box off. He took a look at it and said, “That’s not the original mechanism. Someone put a record player in it.” Well, I was severely disappointed. At the time I was working out of a two car garage and using rental units as my storage. I took this juke back to storage and wasn’t too careful unloading it until I heard the unmistakable sound of coins bouncing around in the cashboxes. I borrowed a screwdriver from the attendant and pried them open. I found about a dozen silver Morgan and Liberty dollar coins from the 20’s, several each of Mercury dimes, buffalo nickels, and Indian head pennies. I thought I was rich-that those silver dollars were worth a hundred dollars each at least! This represented a lot of money to someone just starting out in business and scraping by. This was also well before the internet and easy information so it took awhile to get a numismatics price guide and find out they weren’t worth as much as I thought. (as usual) Still, it was a great find and the coins are in my collection today. All I can come up with is that someone must have used the cashboxes as a piggy bank.

I set out one day to look at a Bandshell someone had called about asking if I were interested in buying it. This was while I had a shop in Seagoville and I bought jukeboxes whenever I could as I was firmly entrenched by then refurbishing the newer jukeboxes and restoring the older ones and always on the lookout for parts machines. I arrived at a house in Pleasant Grove. There were several people gathered in the living room around the jukebox, a family by all appearances. The jukebox was locked up tight. They did not have a key and I had forgotten my key set. Generally I’ll open them up and make sure that everything is present. They mentioned it came with records and that it would light up but do nothing. Well, that is the most common thing people will tell you about a jukebox when it doesn’t work and they want to sell it. You can strip the guts out of any Seeburg and it will still light up. The line voltage, 115vac, is hardwired to the on/off switch and the lights. I think I gave them $75 for it. They helped me load it into my truck and off I went. I unloaded it at the shop and rolled it inside. Which is usually a feat unto itself. Seeburg has the worst casters-they wear out and most of the time it’s more shoving than rolling. I got my keys using #291 to open it up. In addition to the 80 records this jukebox normally loads there were about 50 more loose. And of course they were everywhere since I loaded the jukebox on its back. They were carefully removed and stacked. I pried open the cashbox and found about $50 in assorted change. A fine rebate indeed!

Then there was the old 30’s Mills jukebox and a rebate of a different kind. My buddy Jack Crossland called saying he knew a couple who had a really old jukebox. Jack ran a large route at the time mostly in washaterias and did well with them. He knew these people through that somehow. I drove to his place and we hopped in his car and drove over to the house. As we’re driving up I see a tall dark wooden jukebox in the driveway and husband and wife were cleaning and polishing it industriously. I told Jack to just keep driving. They were “in love” with the machine and I knew they wouldn’t part with it. Time went by. Jack called me perhaps three months later and said they were ready to sell it. They fell out of love with it and I ended up getting it for $400. When I got back to the shop I took my time examining it. It was a Mills of some sort. It had a very unique way of playing the records. It held a dozen 78’s on a big wheel with individual turntables. The selected record would roll around on this merry go round to the play motor. I don’ know if anyone knew or cared but the records were still on it. I carefully removed them. One was a Muddy Waters number, another a Big Bill Broonzy selection. This at a time when blues 78’s went for a LOT! I put those two on auction and ended up getting about $150 for the pair. As for the juke I just really didn’t know what to do with it and ended up selling it for what I gave at a local jukebox and collectible show. It helped me decide to stick with Seeburgs and only the 45rpm machines. It’s still a bit of fun to discover and old silver dime lost in a crack or corner of a 50’s box.