My photographer friend Vinny brought his Marathon cab over today. I’ve always liked the Marathon. It’s a tank of a vehicle, the boxiest, most spacious car you’ll ever find. It has big bench seats and enough leg room to accommodate a Great Dane. The dash is metal, of course, and the bumpers are formidable enough to be on a garbage truck. The Maraton was built as a taxi and it was, in fact, the classic Yellow Checker Cab — unchanged in design since it was first produced in 1960. They stopped making them in 1982.

The Marathon’s charm is its simplicity. As Vinny puts it: “It’s the kind of design you’d get from a child’s drawing of a car.” The first time I saw one, I wanted it. I’m a sucker for vintage cars. The last one I owned was a 1966 Plymouth Valiant station wagon. It had the legendary slant-6 engine, which was supposed to live forever. Just my luck, my slant-six happened to be a lemon. It threw a rod twice and was never right. A bad car is like a bad house — a money pit. And the problem is that, if you put too much in, it seems you can’t give up because you’ll never recoup your loss. So you keep dumping more into it.

The fun part of owning an old car isn’t the engine work — not for me, any way — it’s the cosmetics, fixing up the interior, putting in custom touches, and then, of course, savoring the time machine pleasure of driving it. Old cars look the way it seems cars should look: charmingly boxy outside and living-room spacious inside. New cars, with their squashed backsides and narrow windows and flimsy plastic trim, look like fancy athletic shoes. I understand why they must look that way; it’s all about aerodynamics and gas mileage. But, man, are they ugly.

When I sit in Vinny’s Marathon I feel transported to a time when construction mattered and things were built to last and that meant that the builders took great pride in what they did. I know this is a nostalgic cliche but there it is: being in a well-kept old car makes me feel like the world is better place

Vinny has put about $20K into his Marathon. If you’re going to bring back an old car, you can’t go halfway. After the hard time I had with my ‘66 Valiant, I vowed never to get another old car. But recently, I bought a used Sprinter van for my 66-city Animal House book tour and have been going through the entire old car rehab routine to makle it into a custom camper: body work, paint, interior renovation, the works. It’s been like taking on a huge old house project.


The satisfaction of a car rehab is that you get it exactly the way you want it. Fixing up the Sprinter reminds me of fixing up the old Volkswagen van I had in college. I love the idea of begin wholly self-contained in a tiny house on wheels. But, really, I never thought I’d be doing it again. Our new old van will have just about everything, including a toilet. I’m amazed that so small a vehicle can hold and do so much. When it’s done, I’ll show it to you right here.

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I’ve spent a couple of days sorting through my 78s in search of just the right tune for the book trailer I’m making (”From Animal House to Our House: A Love Story”). I’ve decided that the tune must be old and peppy — maybe something from the 1920s. The music will percolate behind the various interviews featured in the trailer. It’s supposed to be humorous.

Although I’m not a collector of old records, I have picked up quite a few of these 78s at flea markets, where people nearly give them away. Who has a 78 record player any more? Do you? I hoped to digitize them. Wouldn’t that be cool, to have a music library of rare and unusual tunes from way back when? Jill got me a turn-table that plays 78s and now I’ve got my system rigged up to record them onto CDs. I went through more than fifty of them this week. And I did find some quirky stuff. Take, for instance, a pile of Hungarian records–made in the U.S. for recent immigrants. Check this one out from the “jatsza Band Marci”:

Yeah, I know. The sound quality could not be worse. How about this little ditty, that takes you to an eastern European military parade circa 1920? It does get better. I found one of the earliest recordings of Frank Sinatra in a trio that sang with a band called Tommy Tucker Time. Can you pick him out from this clip? I found plenty of old hits, like “Ma! (He’s Making Eyes At Me).” One I really like is “I Get the Neck of the Chicken,” written in 1942 and now associated mostly with Cab Calloway, though somebody else wrote it. (Jimmy McHugh and Frank Loessner). Eddie Stone sings this version. I like his delivery a lot. Another that turns my head is “Gotta See a Dream About a Girl,” also from the ‘forties.

As you can hear, the sound quality on these clips is marginal. That’s because these records — nearly all 78s you’ll find — are in horrible condition. They are, after all, 60-80 years old and they’ve sat in dusty attics, damp basements, and dirty garages for decades. I’ve tried to clean them (with distilled water and a little grain alcohol) but they don’t clean easily, dirt ingrained in the grooves. Then I’ve tried tweak the recordings with an audio mixer but there’s only so much you can do when the original source is so mucked up. As a result, I’ve abandoned my dream of gathering 78s to create a unique music library. Almost anything from the 1940s and later has been re-mastered one way or another and you can find it on the internet. The really old stuff, well, maybe that’s best left to the collectors who know what to look for.

Speaking of collecting, Jill and I came upon a treasure trove of 45s this summer at a yard sale–many of them from the early 1950s, including an early Elvis. We bought a pile of them for $15. A steal, right? We figured we’d clean up on eBay. The ONLY two records that sold from the bunch were the early Elvis (”Love Me Tender”) with a sleeve — for $12– and the Beatles “Do You Want to Know a Secret” without a sleeve for $5.50. Nobody else wanted the other records, which included Little Richard’s “Tutti Fruiti” with the original sleeve and Carl Perkins’s “Blue Suede Shoes” on the SUN label. We listed several more than once. Not a bite.

Why? Four reasons: 1) A lot of records were produced. 2) Which means that collectors can find mint copies without too much bother (and I’m not selling mint copies). 3) Nowadays nobody has the old players for these records. Why bother? It’s a hassle to play them and the novelty wears thing quickly. 5) Finally, all of this music is easily found as Mp3 downloads on the internet. So there you have it: be forewarned — if you find an old record at a flea market and think, “Jackpot!”. think again.

You may have forgotten, as I had, that the length of songs was dictated by the medium — you couldn’t get more than 2-3 minutes of music on a 78 disc. They were the single of the day, which led to the practice of stacking records on a changer that could play 5-10 in one go. This practice continued even after the introduction of the 33 Long Playing record. Singles maintained the short format as 45s replaced the 78s on a much smaller record. Although the 33 LP was introduced in 1931, it wasn’t popularized until the late 1940s and early ’50s, and even then production of 78s continued. I was surprised to find so many 78s from the 1950s.

A revolution in music occurred in the 1920s with the shift from acoustic recording — musicians and singers gathered around a large horn that funneled their performance to a stylus that would engrave their noise onto a cylinder or disc — to electrical recording, which used microphones: the kind of recording we’re used to now, which tremendously increased the sound’s fidelity. The earliest (acoustic) recordings were painfully crude, even to listeners at the time, and this may explain the quality of some of my really old 78s. It appears that the last 78s were produced in 1956. If you go to a flea market today you’ll see stacks of them. Really, it’s remarkable that these brittle shellacked platters have survived and I have to admit that, despite my assertion that I won’t buy anymore, it’s always hard for me to pass them by.

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This year marks the tenth that Jill and I have been working on our old house. When we took on our Queen Anne, it was a wrecked frat house — condemned property that had sat empty for nearly a year. Jill loved it at first sight. I said, “No way.” She was absolutely convinced that we could bring the house back from the brink. Never mind that we knew nothing about fixing a house. Painting — that’s all we knew. We could paint really well. Let me say it again: condemned property — no electricity in half the house, no plumbing, no ceilings in three rooms, no lights, garbage piled high in every room, and so on ad nauseum. It took three 30-yard Dumpsters and 79 industrial-sized garbage bags just to clean the place out. Still, we didn’t imagine that it would be two years before we started painting the walls.

I have always loved old houses. But I would not have bought this ruined frat house had Jill not wanted it so badly. That’s how far gone in love I was with her. We had been dating for only six months at the time. Call me impulsive. Is it remarkable that we saved the house and stayed together through all that mess? A sense of humor helps. The ability to live with chaos helps too. As we share the house with two dogs and two cats, chaos has become one of our specialties.

We have a website dedicated to our ongoing adventure: houselove.org It’s a big site because it tracks ten years of renovation. A decade seems a long time until you find yourself at the end of one. When we moved into our wreck, our new friends down the street kept reminding us that their spectacular home was the product of twenty years’ work. Twenty years? I thought. I’m not working twenty frigging years on a house. But I’m halfway there already.

Jill and I got married in our old house, by the way. That was the third year in. At the time, we thought the house was looking pretty groovy. But, the truth is, it was just starting to look livable. NOW it’s looking groovy. But you see how it goes: it’s all relative. You start with an Animal House wreck and pretty soon you’re willing to give yourself a lot of credit for living in something that looks only somewhat wrecked. There are people — a few of my in-laws, for example — who think that we live in a slum because all of the houses are old. Only in America will you get that attitude. Did you know that strip malls across the nation are being abandoned in favor of newer strip malls? We’re creating a landscape of deserted — zombie — strip malls. Something similar is happening with subdivisions.

But I digress. Is 113 years really old? Relatively, I mean. Think England, think France. Think George Washington.  Apparently, Jill and I will grow old in this oldish house, tinkering with it and improving it. I should confess that the only reason we keep working on the house is that we keep learning how to do this work better. We could have stopped years ago and the house would have been good enough. But, if you believe in progress and the advancement of humankind, good enough is never good enough. Take a peek at houselove.org and you’ll see what I mean.

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