Here is another of this blog’s infrequent forays into the world of early music reocordings. While visiting Sioux Falls this past weekend, I made a detour into a new (to me) thrift store calls Y’s Buys (it’s run by the YMCA). The place was huge. A bit overpriced, but ten times better than the measly Saver’s that’s further down 41st.

They had a small selection of 78rpm records, which at $1.99 apiece were ridiculously overpriced. I managed to find two interesting ones that weren’t broken (I mourn the death-by-neglect of “The Hipster’s Boogie”). I would never have paid their price if they hadn’t been a pair of labels that I’ve never seen before, and will unlikely come across again soon.

Herschel Gold Seal immediately intrigued me with its obviously Jewish moniker and local Northwestern Phonograph Supply Co name. Usually, these indicate a very small record company with a limited catalog and primarily long-forgotten regional artists. The hard part about researching such labels is that today there is almost no surviving information about them. To my surprise, my initial research lasted only five minutes before I hit pay dirt.

A few years ago, science journalist and musical history buff Kurt Gegenhuber began a quest to discover the musicians who played “The Moonshiner’s Dance, Part 1″, featured in the legendary Anthology of American Folk Music. That record was also a Herschel Gold Seal release, and it led Gegenhuber on a sprawling historical journey through the Twin Cities’ early 20th-Century Jewish culture, a journey he recounts in his terrific article Music, Moonshine, and Mahjong. It turns out that Herschel Gold Seal was a house label maintained by Gennett Records for Harry Bernstein’s chain of Minneapolis/St Paul record stores in the late ’20s and early ’30s. The relationship probably originated with the fact that Harry Bernstein’s was a former Starr Piano distributor, and Starr Piano was Gennett’s parent company (the recording division changed its name from Starr to Gennett in 1917).

Gennett Records is a sprawling story in itself. They seemed to specialize in leasing their vast library of recordings to many smaller record labels. Adding to the confusion, they changed their name to Champion in 1930 but continued releasing some of the same recordings previously released on Gennett. I have found side A of this record, “Meadow-Lark” by the Royal Troubadors, on three different labels under as many band names, all apparently the same recording. This particular record, BTW, is a relabel of Gennett 3388, issued around 1927.

Side A: Meadow-Lark, by the Royal Troubadors. Recorded 10/04/1926. This side has heavy surface damage. I did the best I could to minimize the noise. It’s listenable, but not great.

Side B: Sunday, by Harry Pollack and His Club Maurice Diamonds. Recorded 10/01/1926. Again, listenable, but the quality was pretty bad to begin with, and you can do only so much with a disk that’s had its dynamic range ground down to nothing by multiple passes with a steel needle.

As a rule, I hate polka, but I was delighted to find this disk. WNAX is well-known to anyone who grew up in South Dakota, North Dakota, Nebraska, or western Minnesota or Iowa. An unusually powerful station for a relatively small community–in the ’40s it claimed to have the country’s tallest transmitting tower–WNAX was one of the most popular stations in the predominantly rural upper midwest. The rest of the country better recognizes its most famous musical prodigy, Lawrence Welk, whose decade-long stint as leader of the WNAX house band took him from struggling road musician to household name.

After the Welk era, WNAX housed many acts, mostly specializing in the polka-style music the heaviliy-Germanic upper-plains population enjoyed. One of the longest-lived of these groups was the WNAX Bohemian Band. The Bohemian Band could be heard every weeknight at 6:15, and played under the sponsorship of Minneapolis-based Grain Belt Beer. (The “Grainbelt Polka” song featured on this record is surely a thinly-veiled advertisement for their sponsor.)

The WNAX Bohemian Band. L-R: Billy Dean, Homer Schmidt (a veteran of Lawrence Welk’s ensemble), Bill Tonyan (still alive and performing!), Keith Eide, Rex Hays, Lynn Edwards, Eddie Texel, and Fred Burgi.

I left the noise level higher in these two recordings, because the dynamic range was so unusually well-preserved in these little-played sides that I didn’t want to sacrifice it. They’re still pretty good quality. The A side and B side are a guess, as the record has no catalog number. I went by the sequence of their recording matrix numbers.

Side A: Marenka Polka

Side B: Grainbelt Polka

In the words of Monda, I am heartsick. The typewriter I have lusted after for ages, the Monarch 101, matched in its elegance only by its elusiveness, just went to someone with far deeper pockets than I. I hope whoever won it loves it as much as I have from afar.

I’m going to go cry into some vodka now.

Spurred by both the need to downsize a bit and our sense of duty to stimulate the economy, we sold our massive old entertainment center and are in the market for a new TV stand. The old nightstand that the TV now sits on functions well enough, but is a bit topheavy (not a good thing with a toddler running around). So we went shopping for a new TV stand. However, we want something that fits with our midcentury sensibilities, not an easy thing in this mission/prairie/craftsman age. Here are a few interesting items we came across, though most are not in the running for cost reasons.

The Predicta

Oh, my gawd, check out this beauty! Telstar Electronics has a whole line of atomic-inspired, custom-built televisions. The only drawbacks (besides price) are that the screens are CRT tubes and not HD, and the largest is 24″. Still, this would look so very, very cool in your sunken den.

The Kurve

From England comes this beauty that’s just begging for you to run your hands along its suede finish. It’s not yet available, and I’m sure that by the time it is I still won’t be able to afford the overseas shipping.

The Audra

This is perfect if your tastes lean toward ’60s/’70s Danish modern. This is the one, in fact, that we had picked out, but it seems to have been discontinued, despite what Home Decorators’ web site says.

The Wharfside

Speaking of Danish modern, UK furniture makers Wharfside make this gorgeous stand with sliding tambourine doors. Downside: I have a slight problem with buying a TV stand that costs 3 times the television that’s going to be sitting on it.

The Swedx

Again, from Europe (maybe we ought to just move there). This all-wood television suite really wouldn’t fit in any way with our living room, but it’s pretty nifty, nonetheless.

The Atlas A4

Impressive, but, uh, we just unloaded a wall-sized unit, and I’m pretty sure our old plaster-and-lathe walls are not going to support that.

The Wilkerson

If you really want to go down Retro Road, and have the cash to spare, have Wilkerson Furnituremakers custom-craft this extremely throwback cabinet around your flat-panel. Hope you don’t have a TiVo box or anything like that.

I suspect that unless there is a drastic drop in the prices of these high-end products, my best bet will probably be to find an old turntable console at the thrift store, gut it, and convert it for living room AV use.

This past weekend, I took time to indulge in a side hobby that I haven’t had much time for lately: early audio recordings. The occasion was a melancholy one. Fine Groove Records, one of the finest and last independent music shops, is closing its doors after 26 years of peddling new and used music in Northfield, MN. I collared a friend who also collects 78rpm records and we spent the afternoon rifling through the shop’s hundreds of shellac disks and LPs, searching for overlooked gems. (For me, my gems were a previously unknown to me Raymond Scott recording, an early Eartha Kitt record, a promotional double-disk interview with Laurie Anderson never released to the public, and the elusive second volume of Henry Mancini’s music from “Peter Gunn” in mint condition. My friend hit a rich vein of Spike Jones recordings.)

Owner Brian KenKnight says that the decline of locally-purchased music, along with rising property taxes, caused him to make the decision. He told us that the vinyl collectors were still coming in, but his primary customer base of college students have turned more and more to digital downloading, both the legitimate and illegitimate variety.

Today’s big, flashy, electronics stores have nothing on independant shops like Fine Groove. Brian can tell you the career history of almost any musician from the 1920s on. He’s the kind of shop owner that actually listens to the stuff he sells and knows that if you like artist A that you might also like artist B. He keeps a pair of turntables behind the counter and will let you play something to see if you like it before you buy it. At Best Buy, you’re lucky to get a sales droid who’s aware that Thelonious Monk is not a rapper.

More than economic, the closing of Fine Groove will have a cultural impact on Northfield’s Division Street. Fine Groove was a place to hang out and talk music with someone who knows and loves music, and you always came out feeling richer (in the spiritual sense) for having gone in. Independent business owners who are informed and enthusiastic about their products are few and far between these days.

In tribute to Brian and other indie music shop owners, here is a collection of record labels from days gone by. Though Columbia is still around, and Gramophone eventually became EMI, these are labels mostly forgotten by all but us who dig in thrift store boxes and dusty bins in hopes of finding that obscure folk song or Uncle Johnny Coons comedy routine.

We wrap up our look at questionable products from the 1906 Sears catalog with a trio of products designed to make small things appear larger.

So realistic, your friends will never notice! The first look like some sort of deformed ice skates, but the latter two look a lot like shoes that you can buy today at Hot Topic.

The mental images that the phrase “bust food” brings to mind are just…indescribable.

And if the Bust Food didn’t work, a lady could resort to…

Made in Sweden, no doubt.

More dubious Sears Roebuck offerings as they come my way.

We continue our trip back in time to visit some of the more curious products you could order from the Sears catalog in 1906. Today, we take a look at selections from the Drugs Department, starting with possibly the grossest ad copy ever printed.

“We’re the Cadillac of worm syrup!”

Beer: it does a body good!

There are so many things wrong with this. But standing out above it all is the phrase, “derangement of the female organism”. (Fellas, if you know what’s good for you, you’ll leave that one alone. I’m slowly backing away from it myself.)

My research on Conley cameras takes me through a lot of early 20th-Century Sears catalogs. Tens of thousands of mail-order items could be had from their sprawling Chicago warehouses. A person could literally buy a pre-fabricated house, furnish it, stock the pantry, fill the medicine cabinet, line the library shelves, clothe the family, and put a car in the garage–all from one catalog. In the days before the Internet, the Sears catalog was the Internet; you didn’t need anything more. Their series of international stereoviews–65¢ per 100–was the armchair traveler’s Wikipedia.

Looking at them today, some of the products on the market at the time range from the quaintly amusing to the downright bizarre. In sprite of their respectable reputation, Sears, Roebuck, & Co were not above peddling snake oil. For your entertainment, here are a few products from the 1906 Sears catalog that are dubious at best:

This is a mix of weird and sad. One can’t help but wonder how many of these things were sold before people figured out that they were bogus. One also has to wonder at what point the device began to strangle the poor little kids.

Edit: holy shit, you can still buy them.

I can actually see the practical purpose of this. Hot water tanks were a luxury, and didn’t hold much water. At the same time, you can’t imagine yourself actually using one of these, can you?

Hope your feet aren’t sweaty. Bzzzt!

“Legs half-off for legs half-off!” Man, what I wouldn’t give to come across a Sears Artificial Leg Pamplet on eBay.

Tomorrow, we’ll explore some of the medicinal products you could ingest for your, um, health.

Meet the incredibly scarce Keaton Music Typewriter. It’s not quite a typewriter as one would think of one in the traditional sense, is it? It’s a bit of an exoskeletor typing machine. Blank sheet music (not included in the photo for the sake of showing detail) rests on the board beneath the machine; the typebars downstrike to hit it. The shift scale indicator (curved part) delineates different points on the musical scale and the scale shift handle moves the type segment back and forth accordingly. (Click here to see the main keyboard separated from the smaller staff marks keyboard.) It has three spacebars which can move the machine from a partial note to an entire chord. If I knew the first thing about musical notation, I’m sure I could tell you all sorts of other fascinating things that it can do. Alas, I do not, and the manual is missing.

Very little is known about these machines, including how many may have been made. We know from patent records that a smaller, 14-key version was made from 1936 to 1953, when the 33-key version appeared. The one above is the 1950s model. Obviously, the market for such a contraption was small to begin with. They seem to have been purchased primarily by school music departments and small sheet-music publishing companies. Certainly, the device is too plodding to have been of much use to an individual composer. A Keaton is to a regular typewriter what a large-format plate camera is to a 35mm with autofocus and built-in light meter. It seems to be best suited for producing a single master copy to use to make multiple additional copies.

The best source of information I’ve found is, not surprisingly, an article Darryl Rehr wrote for issue #25 of ETCetera. You may note that the Keaton featured in Rehr’s article is serial #3184. Mine is #3180. As of 1993, when the article was published, there were about half a dozen known Keatons. I’ve learned that a handful of additional examples have turned up since then. Certainly the total number of known Keatons is less than two dozen. Undoubtedly, additional machines will crop up as schools and shops clear out their back rooms.

On a personal note, if you haven’t guessed by now, this is the typewriter I hinted at in a previous post. It was hidden away from general sight in a back room of an antique dealer’s storage barn, where I found out it has sat for a decade. The case is dirty and beaten, but the typewriter itself is in splendid condition, all things considered. I only had to reattach a few disconnected typebars; an easy fix. (Loose or missing typebars and missing keytops seem to be a common failure point among the handful of other specimens I’ve seen. The typebars are held in place by only a weak pair of brass finger-stockings, and they keytops are simply pushed onto their posts.) Despite its intricacy, it has a wonderful semi-homemade feel, from its ALCOA-stamped pots-n-pans aluminum frame to the re-purposed battery clips manufactured by the Mueller Elec. Co. of Cleveland, OH. Oddly, the typewriter collecting community in general doesn’t seem very interested in Keatons. Perhaps it’s because one can’t type actual words with them, or perhaps it’s the nontraditional design. Or perhaps it’s just too new. If this were an equally odd and only somewhat more scarce 1800s Hansen Typing Ball, collectors would be going ape over its discovery. Oh, well. I like it, and that’s all I care about.

Maybe I’ll do a coded typecast on it someday. Everybody get out your Oliver Hammond secret decoder rings!

So yesterday, I come home to find M. Clemen’s gorgeous Erika folding portable awaiting, on it’s side, by my back gate. Fortunately, he had packed it well, and no damage was done by the Three Stooges Postal Service. This is the one I received in trade for my 1951/2 Smith-Corona Sterling. Hardly a fair trade, but I’ve committed to repairing the Erika’s few functional shortcomings. Such as the platen that spins freely around its core, the crumbling feed roller, and the mangled paperclip that serves as the bell-dinger spring.

At the same time, my first round of Traveling Type arrived from Strikethru! My, she has a nice pair of
rubber stamps. A large Remington standard adorns the front of the envelope, while a large Western Union telegram facsimile fills a large portion of the back. Inside is a Travelling Type log entry form which I dare any of the other participants, including myself, to best. The script Hermes 3000 she typed her submission on makes my Escort 55 quail.

This morning, because I’d had them sent to the office to protect against potentially being left out in the rain, I had two more typewriters waiting for me! (Yes, you may assume at this point, if you haven’t already, that I have a collecting problem.) These were eBay machines that were about to be won by keychoppers, for insultingly low prices. I impulsively threw in a pair of lowball bids and walked away, only to be surprised in the morning by a pair of “You won!” emails. Suffice it to say that the total cost of both machines, including shipping, was less than the one usually goes for, minus shipping. I don’t know what typewriter gods were smiling down upon me that day.

One is a Remington Remie Scout, made sometime from 1932-1934. The serial number has been deliberately obliterated, so I can’t find out for sure. The Remie Scout was another inexpensive, no-frills Depression-era typewriter, sometimes sold as the Monarch or the Pioneer. Update: the serial number has been found! It was behind the top row of keys, hidden beneath several layers of dust. Not sure what the mangled number on the side of the segment piece was supposed to be.

The other is a 1929 Underwood Standard Portable 3-bank in forest green. I’ve lusted after one of these 3-bank Underwoods for ages. The fact that it isn’t the standard black is just icing on the cake. Alas, the ribbon spool covers are missing, but that’s fairly typical with these guys. Too soon to have photos yet, but it looks just like this one on Richard Polt’s site.

So far my promise to the spousal unit to begin unloading typewriters has resulted in exactly one typewriter removed from the house, which was canceled out by the Erika, and four new ones coming in.

I should look on the bright side: an addition to typewriters is highly unlikely to kill me with an infected needle.

More typewriter ephemera. Matchbook cover detail advertising this typewriter. I plan to print it out as an 8×10 and hang it on the wall above the Speedline assembly. If you’d like to do the same, you can download the large version from my Flickr page, or e-mail me to get the more printer-friendly 1200dpi original.