Nov. 3, 1978 Gusto cover story: Jukeboxes

 

A Gusto cover story that stands the test of time.

Nov. 3, 1978

Jukeboxes

“Drop the coin right into the slot,

You’ve got to hear somethin’ that’s really hot …”

– Chuck Berry, “School Days”

         When Chuck Berry celebrated it in that couplet in the late 1950s, the jukebox was the king of the coin-operated machines. No more. Gone are the days when every corner tavern, lunch counter and neighborhood soda shop served up a parade of hits for the drop of a coin and the press of a button.

         “It’s definitely down from what it used to be,” says John Hollands of Empire Music in Cheektowaga, whose vending operation includes more than 100 phonographs, as they’re called in the trade. “It’s been a multitude of things. It started when TV came in, when they started putting TVs in bars.”

         The tide of popular sentiment has been running against jukeboxes ever since. They never successfully made the switch from hit 45s to album cuts, let alone disco. Taverns unplugged them in the early ‘70s and installed sound systems run by deejays, not some guy who wants to hear “Feelings” for the 14th time. Meanwhile, the successor to the corner lunch counter – the fast food outlet – never bothered to install them in the first place.

         So these are not exactly golden years for the 150 jukebox operators in the Buffalo area – an operator being anyone who has machines in at least two locations. The operators split the proceeds with the owners of the locations and the operators also are obliged to repair the machines and provide the records.

         “I remember when operators used to come in here and buy tons of stuff,” says a saleswoman at Buffalo One-Stop, which wholesales discs for jukeboxes. “You know what’s happening is these deejays are going in and playing records. The best locations these days are the Black locations. The Black locations have always done the best.”

         Whatever the location, if you want to put a brand new jukebox in it, it will cost slightly more than a new pinball machine or a video game – about $2,000. Buy 10, get the 11th one free. Operators will keep a machine three to 10 years, occasionally up to 15 years. “Jukeboxes last much longer than pinball machines,” says Ruth Willrich, sales representative for Rowe International in Cheektowaga. “They don’t get as much abuse.”

         The jukebox is descended from the coin-operated player piano. It’s said that a San Francisco saloon keeper started it all in 1899 by installing an electric Edison phonograph that played tunes for a nickel. The box didn’t become a familiar fixture, however, until after the development of electronic amplification in the late ‘20s and the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, which reopened the taverns.

         Jukeboxes rode in on the crest of an American craze for coin machines. They were so popular that they rescued the record industry from the Depression and reversed the domination of radio. Benny Goodman swung to fame on jukebox hits. So did Glenn Miller.

         John Velchoff, program director for WGRQ-FM, collects jukeboxes from the Glenn Miller era. Stored with family and friends in his hometown in Mississippi are better than half a dozen classic machines built by Wurlitzer in North Tonawanda.

         “My parents and grandparents operated a restaurant in the early ‘50s and had jukeboxes," Velchoff says. “I was always fascinated watching those machines play records. I loved the colors and the bubbles. I always wanted one.”

         He acquired his first jukebox in 1973 from a jukebox operator friend of his father’s. Velchoff and the jukebox operator took parts from three old machines and built one that worked.

         “Originally, it was a machine that played 78 rpm records and it had been converted to play 45s,” Velchoff recalls. “We converted it back. This guy still had the original parts he took off 10 years earlier. In Vicksburg, you find things like that. People save stuff.”

         Mississippi is a better place to find old jukeboxes than Western New York, Velchoff observes. Around here it’s not easy to find ones he’s looking for – 13 models of wooden-cabinet 24-play Wurlitzers made between 1938 and 1948. Starting out looking much like conservative console radios, the series evolved into a rococo celebration of ornamental paneling and gaudy plastic lights. Today they are prized among collectors. The colorful spaceship on Electric Light Orchestra’s “Out of the Blue” album is inspired by a 1946 Wurlitzer extension speaker.

         Velchoff looks for old jukeboxes in newspaper ads, in the columns of a tabloid called The Antique Trader and in magazines like Loose Change, which appeals to collectors of everything from old slot machines to barrel organs.

         “A lot of people thought the Wurlitzer sound was better,” Velchoff says. “The Wurlitzer tone arm is weird, though. It’s a bone of contention among collectors. Technically, it was better sounding, but it was a prickly beast to keep tunes. The weight on the record was three to four ounces – today it’s like grams – and it wore the records out real fast.

         “They had a metal needle,” he continues, “and it was good for 400 plays. The records were good for about 50 plays. Here’s an old service manual that tells you how you can reuse the needle by turning it around. It also tells you to carry an old records with you to break in your new needle with.

         “They were very simple machines,” Velchoff observes. “At that time, they didn’t know how to make them play both sides of the record. They also couldn’t make the tone arm move. They’d lift the record up to the needle. One motor runs the whole thing. It drives all the cams and shafts.”

         This simple machine was one of the things that saved Wurlitzer from going broke during the Depression. With talking movies ruining the theater organ business and the bottom falling out of the piano market, Wurlitzer took a chance in 1933 and acquired right to a record-selecting mechanism.

         “We owed more than $1 million to five banks,” Farny Wurlitzer, chairman of the company, told a reporter in 1965. “An accountant they’d hired for a survey told them we should close the plant and forget about the jukebox. ‘The jukebox is no fit product for a company like this,’ he said. ‘It will be used in the lowest kind of places.’”

         Fortunately, the banks saw it Wurlitzer’s way. The sprawling North Tonawanda plant, expanded after Wurlitzer bought out a local pioneer in developing the electric organ, was turned from the production of theater organs to the manufacture of jukeboxes. By 1937, the largest music factory in the world couldn’t keep up with the demand.

         World War II interrupted the classic Wurlitzer jukebox series and the plant turned to making generators, servo amplifiers, intercoms for bombers, airplane anti-icers, magnetic compasses, proximity fuses and the Bat missile.

         After the way, Wurlitzer pushed into the electronic musical instrument field again, concentrating on its newly-developed electric piano. Jukebox sales continued to set records and accounted for 25 percent of the company’s receipts through the ‘60s. Not long after a nostalgia version of the classic 1946 Model 1015 was produced, the North Tonawanda main plant was closed. Since 1974, all Wurlitzer jukeboxes have been made in West Germany.

         “It made more sense to serve the world market from one plant instead of two,” says A. Donald Arsem, former board chairman of Wurlitzer and now an associate professor in the School of Management at the State University of Buffalo. “The market outside the U.S. was still growing. Inside the U.S., the market was saturated.”

         The American jukebox scene now is dominated by Seeburg and Rowe-AMI. Wurlitzer, oddly, was never that well-represented in Western New York.

         “Wurlitzers were strong in the Tonawandas,” says John Hollands. “You had to have Wurlitzers up there. But I haven’t seen one around this area in years. It’s a shame, because they made them here. It’s strange, though, because Wurlitzer is big in St. Louis and that’s where Seeburg is made. I’ll tell you, frankly, it’s all in the selling price.

         “These days,” Hollands continues, “you can make a faster dollar in games. On these video games, you can make $200, $300, $400 a week. On a jukebox, if you’re making $30 a week, you consider it a good location. What somebody ought to do is pick an area and give five plays for a quarter, just like the old days. Maybe it would get people back to playing the phonographs.”

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IN THE PHOTO: The Wurlitzer Model 1015 jukebox. Available these days for about $10,000.

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FOOTNOTE: Johnny Velchoff’s Facebook page currently features the logo for WZZQ-FM in Gaffney, S.C., and photos of jukeboxes.