I have told before about how it was one summer night in 1981, while listening to Henry Boggen's old show that broadcast out of Charlotte, NC, on WBT-AM, and that doesn't bear repeating here either as it is told elsewhere. Another factor though which had a lot of bearing was concurrent with listening to that show, and it is what I would do while I listened to it. Being I didn't have a set bedtime in the summer months due to not being in school then (during school nights, Mom made me go to bed at 9PM sharp up until I was in my teens), I could stay up much later and that is how I often got to listen to Henry's show all the way through. At that time in the little town of Kirby, WV, where we lived, our house was a 2-bedroom mobile home with blue-and-white trim and a long front porch with a small storage room. When you'd enter the front door, you would be in the living room, and at this particular time we didn't have a great deal of furniture but one thing we did have was a small wooden rocking chair that Mom had sitting in the southeast corner of the room beside a small end table. I recall there was a lamp on the table, and for a long time the radio also sat there too. Also in those days, we "inherited" a lot of people's old magazines, which I always found of interest. Many of those magazines I would read many times over, and some of it was rather unique material for a 5th-grader then - Family Circle, Newsweek, and of particular interest, Reader's Digest. From the Family Circle magazines I recall I learned a lot of interesting cooking tips and other things, and sometimes the ads fascinated me for some odd reason. But, it was the Reader's Digest issues that got my attention the most, both because they had good articles, but also because back in the day Reader's Digest also advertised music collections you could buy. Many of them were very good boxed sets - usually consisting of between 6-10 LP's - of standard recordings of a given genre, and a couple of years later I would have my first two of those. However, on occasion they would advertise things for a company called the Franklin Mint, and at that time Franklin Mint issued these monumentally huge record sets (100 records in 50 albums of 2 records each) that you could purchase on subscription. One of those was what I call the "Holy Grail" of vintage big band recordings - it was a 100-record set entitled The Greatest Recordings of the Big Band Era, and it was truly monumental for its time. When I first got interested in this music, I literally salivated over that collection and wanted it bad. To have gotten that, I would have had within two years the collection it's taken me 30 to get now! The albums in this collection were library-quality too - the records were pressed on red vinyl, two to an album, with extensive liner notes included with them. The boxes they were housed in were silver in color with a burgundy logo. Here is what one of them looked like:
However, when you are a poor kid from a single-parent home growing up in semi-rural West Virginia, the likelihood of getting something like that was so negligible that you would probably been more guaranteed a visit from the Tooth Fairy at that time than you would having a set of these show up on your doorstep. But, one could dream, and also there were the smaller but equally good Reader's Digest-issued sets which were easier to find, and one of those in particular got my attention and would be in my collection in less than a couple of years.
Some years before Franklin Mint reissued their monumental collection of vintage big band recordings in the late 1970's, Reader's Digest at that time would have had the next-best collection. This one was a ten-LP set entitled The Great Band Era, and it consisted of a retrospective of rare recordings otherwise not found on LP then that was arranged in a chronological order beginning with the year 1936 and going to 1945, the traditional dates of the "big band era." You could actually purchase this collection from Reader's Digest for less than $50 at that time (still a lot of cabbage for a poor West Virginia kid!) which made it more accessible. The collection was boxed in packaging that looked like this at the time:
The cover art on this one is the older issue from the late 1960's, as it was later repackaged in a similar box and looked more like this when I got my first set:
Despite subtle differences in packaging and a title change, the collection was essentially the same. At the time I got this one (around Spring of 1985), I was still pretty much restricted then to buying many of my records in my collection for a quarter apiece at the old "Rio Mall" in Rio, WV, about 6 miles from where we lived in Kirby at this time. My early days of collecting records were a lot less discriminating, although in due time I would begin to refine what I kept and would also "weed out" a bunch of rather cheap pop records and other stuff I had obtained. My goal then was to have a purely big band music collection, and as big band recordings were scarce but not totally impossible to find then, I resorted to getting them through the mail. However, as an irresponsible teenager, that almost got me into trouble, as I found it was easier to order things than it was to pay for them, and I had to learn a harsh lesson about that. In later years, my policy would be to pay for it upfront, and then there would be no issues. That is why today I have a debt-free collection.
Around the time I became a born-again Christian in early 1986, my musical interest took a back seat to my newfound faith, but that was actually a good thing - I was getting way too obsessed with my music collection, and needed to prioritize. I never stopped listening to this great music though, but the scope of my collection took a new direction instead as church activities, and sub sequentially college, married life, and so many other things began to shape my future. But, my collection was not forgotten, and with the advent of the CD and a flood of good reissued recordings in the mid-1990's, I began to actively collect for a few years again. In due time, it also meant re-collecting vintage vinyl as well (much of my original collection was lost in a storage unit in Marianna, FL, back in 1992 not long after Barb and I first married) and the major boost in that came around 2004-2005.
One of the things I have thanked the good Lord for over the years is the phenomenon called E-Bay. In 2005, after discovering E-Bay for myself and learning the art of the bid and other tricks, I was able to find the entire Franklin Mint set on there for less than $200, and being I had the means then, I purchased them. They are in great condition, and are now a very good part of my LP collection.
With that, I sort of reached the pinnacle of collecting at that point, and in the next 10 years or so I began to purchase less and less. And, that brings us to today.
The past year, as far as getting new recordings, has been a bit slow - for once I feel I have the collection I have always wanted, and over the past year (2015-16) I have only gotten about 10 new CD recordings and about 7 LP's. As of October 1st, my current collection stands at 912 LP records, 1207 CD's, and 97 vintage DVD recordings of big band-related media (movies, Vitaphone "soundies" and live concerts). This year too, I have also taken to a new thing I have discovered - you can, if you know where to look, find vintage recordings on YouTube and elsewhere which can be downloaded as an MP3 and saved to CD discs. I have taken to doing that as well, and have built up a sizeable collection of those as well.
In this coming year, I am not really anticipating much growth in my collection as a planned move as well as my graduate studies are taking up much of my time these days, and I don't have the time to really research what's new out there. Nonetheless, I am always on the lookout for new material I don't have in my collection as of yet, and as it comes available, I am now in a better position to acquire it. So, as year 35 begins, this will be a year I anticipate will be slow in growth, but still a vibrant interest. So long until next time.
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