im in love with these shoes/juke boxes/antiques/pin balls and generally anything cool thread

The one you pictured is the model 800 from 1940,  Chrissy.  It's one of the five Wurlitzer "bubblers".  
These were the five models which incorporated "bubble tubes" in the design.
Those were glass tubes filled with a liquid which produced bubbles when heated.  The bubble tubes had turning colored light cylinders behind them and that gave the effect of constantly rising bubbles which changed colors.
The 850 (Peacock) and the 950 (Pipes of Pan) are also two of the five bubblers.

I fooled with pinball machines (bought, sold and repaired them) going all the way back to my college days.
In the mid-1970's,  me and about a dozen other people scattered across the country (several in Iowa),  kind of independently started to re-discover these treasures.  What made me first aware of them was going into rural warehouses and barns looking for the pinball machines and seeing these amazing 1940's jukeboxes sitting there deteriorating.
One of the first places I found them was actually in a barn outside Tuskegee,  Alabama.  An old black jukebox operator had stored some in a barn on his farm.  I drove a rented U-Haul truck across a pasture to retrieve them from that barn.
At the time there were no cosmetic parts being made to restore them.  So we took several and put them together to make one good one.  
I remember stripping the guts out of three 1946 Wurlitzers to sell for parts and taking the cabinets and dumping them in the woods on the other side of 9th Ave from Pensacola Junior College.  
Not long after that I realized that those cabinets were actually in restorable condition and I had been a damn fool for throwing them away.
But when I went back to get them they were gone,  probably somebody used them for firewood.  If I had not thrown them away and still had the complete three jukeboxes today,  in restored condition they would be worth about $30,000.  I'm still have nightmares about doing that.  lol

But after buying them from the guy with the barn in Tuskegee,  I went on a treasure hunt for the next two decades buying them throughout the southeast.
Yes,  I've had multiples of all of them pictured in the posts except the 950 (Pipes of Pan).  That one eluded me the whole time.
After a couple of decades of searching for them and finding them,  and others criss-crossing the south looking for them after me,  they were all gone.  

All I saved from those days is two 1948 Rockolas.  I just never got around to selling them.  I can make one good one out of the two but it's a fairly big job to do a restoration on one and I've gotten lazy in my old age.  Hopefully I'll get around to it someday before I croak.
This is the 1948 Rockola.

Bob, these are truly pieces of Americana art . . . . . honestly it would be hard to pick one because they are all just beautiful. Your dedication to seek and restore these treasures is more than admirable . . . .jeez they are gorgeous. Fred Levin probably has one of each . . . . lol

knothead wrote: Fred Levin probably has one of each . . . . lol

As I'm aware,  nobody ever turned Levin onto them.  But he did have some really modern pinball machines in his home in Gulf Breeze.

There are several collections in the area.  A guy in East Hill has a nice collection and another person east of Gulf Breeze has a large quantity and restores and sells them (mostly at the Chicago show like I did).  And the biggest local collector back in the day was Doug McCrary who back then was the president of Gulf Power.  He had a really large number of them and did the restorations himself.

Watch this video, knothead.
This is the holy grail in action, the Wurlitzer 950 (Pipes of Pan).
It's in John Papa's store in upstate New York. He's one of the biggest antique jukebox dealers in the country now and does really beautiful restorations.

You can probably guess who invented the jukebox if I tell you he's the same person who invented about every damn thing else.
The first jukebox was produced by Thomas Edison in 1906. It was the Edison Multiphone which was a coin-operated machine that for a nickel would play one of 24 Edison cylinder records.



Shortly after Edison introduced his, the Regina music box company made their first "jukebox" in 1908 and called it the Regina Hexaphone.



There's a sad story to go with that one. Back when I started I had a wanted ad every week in the Shopper paper to buy old jukeboxes and other coin-operated antiques.
About 1980 an antique phonograph collector from Texas started visiting relatives here for two weeks every summer and I got to know him. And when he was here he always put a wanted ad in the PNJ classifieds to buy old phonographs.
One year he called me to tell me he had actually located and bought a Hexaphone from someone who had it in their house on Oriole Beach Road east of Gulf Breeze. It had been in that house for decades and it was in virtually mint condition.

Because I was "Low Overhead Bob" and ran the free ads in the Shopper paper and was too cheap to buy the paid ads in the newspaper, is why the people on Oriole Beach Road never saw my ads and why that Hexaphone is sitting in his house now and not in mine. And he got it cheap which made it even more painful.
That taught me a lesson the hard way about being TOO obsessed with overhead. lol

Sal wrote:
Did he steal the idea from Tesla?

Edison (or his employees) invented the phonograph in 1877. And Tesla started working for him in 1882. So Tesla may have been involved in Edison's phonograph development after that but I've never seen any evidence that Tesla had any interest in that technology. So it's doubtful.

What we really think of as a "jukebox" was actually invented by a known drunk. While inebriated, he tinkered in his home and came up with the first prototype of a record changing mechanism and showed it to J.P Seeburg
who bought it from him.

Bob, you are a lucky man to have spent your life working on something that you love. Those old machines are beautiful and they take us back to a different era. Thanks for sharing with us and educating us a little about jukeboxes.

Bob, you've inspired me. that juke box history is interesting as hell. thank you.

you know we have the Edison museum down here in ft myers. I have been down this way going on 3 years and have not gone to it. but after your post just now. I am determined to go very soon.

I hope they have a copy of that Edison juke box.

I've been to the Edison Museum there but it was when I was around 14. I probably didn't have the appreciation for it at 14 that I would today. But I do remember that it was a neat place.

Ichi,

When you and I were walking in Navy Point,  we talked about Fletcher Blalock.
As you know,  Blalock was the biggest jukebox route operator based in Pensacola going all the way back to the beginning.  
But he was more than that.  He was one of the first Wurlitizer jukebox distributorships and owned the business which sold Wurlitzers to other operators all over the deep south.
The talk about dumping jukeboxes in the woods reminds me of one of Blalock's business practices.

When we used to see a jukebox (or other coin-operated amusement machine) in a bar or other location,  it was very rare that the location itself owned that jukebox.  The way the jukebox business works is with what are called route operators.  These are businesses who contract with the bar to place and maintain the jukebox.  And they give the bar owner 50% of the income the jukebox earns and they keep the other 50%.

The biggest fear of the route operators was that the bar owner would buy his own jukebox (and other amusment machines) and cut them out of the business.  
Blalock and other operators came up with every method they could think of to try to prevent that from happening.  They often made loans to the bar owners (many needed capital) to keep that from happening.  And it also was not uncommon for Blalock to buy the building the bar owner was renting from as well (Blalock owned a lot of real estate in our area back then  lol).  
The whole industry became involved with the mob from the outset because coin-operated machines provided a perfect way for the mob to launder money.  So the jukebox business back then was involved with all kinds of questionable practices because it was so associated with gangsters and mobsters.

Which gets me back to the original point about dumping stuff.  As a jukebox distributor,  Blalock came up with a novel idea.  He promised all the operators he was selling jukeboxes to when they traded in jukeboxes to him in the purchase of new ones,  that he would take the trade-ins to the dump so they could not get into the hands of the location owners.
Back in the 70's,  Blalock's employees told me many stories about how they were instructed to beat the shit out of the trade-ins with slegehammers and then they loaded the remains onto trucks and hauled them to the landfill.  
Somewhere buried in that landfall are hundreds of examples of the jukeboxes pictured in this thread.  lol
And it also explains why I never found very many of the classic jukeboxes in our area and instead had to travel to find them. They had mostly been destroyed.

Chrissy wrote:Bob, you've inspired me. that juke box history is interesting as hell. thank you.

you know we have the Edison museum down here in ft myers. I have been down this way going on 3 years and have not gone to it. but after your post just now. I am determined to go very soon.

I hope they have a copy of that Edison juke box.

A pristine example of the Multiphone (first jukebox) is on display in the museum, Chrissy. By all means visit the museum and eyeball it in person.
That museum is chock full of interesting stuff to see.

Gosh Bob...that story is just so sad.  

It reminds me of what happened to a lot of old wooden cabinets/chests (tansus) in Japan. There was a time back 30 or so years ago when the younger folks had no use for them. In modern Japan "new" is best. So when mom and dad or grandma/grandpa passed away, and the kids were going through stuff in the house, many tansus were burned or thrown away. Today, even though most Japanese don't have any use for them in their own homes, at least there is an appreciation for them. Or maybe it's just that they realized that foreigners will buy them, lol.

Mr Ichi wrote:Great info, Mr Bob.  Baylocks guys were the only people in town who could carry large amounts of cash money into very seedy bars.  Black Hats, black cars, NOBODY even thought about messing with them.  I think they also provided "Change" to the different bar owners.  Thanks.  I can still see them coming into "Taylor's Tea Room" to service the machines.

One of Blalock's jukebox mechanics and I became good friends back then.
At one point Larry got me a complete list of Blalock's customers (the jukebox operators he sold Wurlitzer jukeboxes to) which were located all over the south back in the 40's.
That was like a Rosetta Stone for me. I spent the next couple of years running down those operators to see what they still had stored away. Many were gone by then but their family members occasionally still owned the barns and other places they'd stored the things in.
Those old jukebox guys were some really colorful (and sometimes scary) people to deal with. Because back in the 40's they not only ran jukeboxes but many of them also ran slot machines. Before the Johnson Act of 1951 put an end to slot machines, the two things (jukeboxes and slot machines) went hand in hand. Back then, slot machines were all over Pensacola. Even in barber shops.

The slot machine business is an even more interesting part of American history than the jukeboxes.
All of it grew out of the depression. Because during the depression, people didn't have the money they had to spend on entertainment prior to it. But they did still have nickels. lol
And the whole coin-operated amusement, music and gambling industry was invented to separate people from those nickels. lol

One piece of trivia about how slot machines first really caught on.
One of the earliest and biggest manufacturers of them (in Chicago) was Herbert Mills. Mills came up with a brilliant plan to market his slot machines.
He would ship them unsolicited to Railway Express agents across the country. And when the Railway Express agent received the slot machine, it came with a letter which said "if you want to make some real money, take this slot machine to a bar or other place and tell the location owner you will give him half the money it makes and you will keep the other half. If you do this and it makes you a lot of money then come back to me and I will sell you more of them. If it doesn't make you money then you have nothing to lose so just dispose of the machine".
Mills knew the machines would make money. And he knew the Railway Express agents would buy more once they discovered that. And they did buy more. Lots more. It made them and Mills very wealthy. lol

You did not get the split correct. They would take the cash and half of it was taken off the table. The other half was split and with half going to the business owner and half went to the vending company. Half of that cash was never reported by either business. You are correct about organized crime finding its way into the vending business. I saw these practices for years as a kid.

The Department of Revenue would catch bar owners who would leave the cash register open, and not report bar sales by simply going to liquor distributors and seeing what their total purchases were. They had a range of acceptable shrinkage, and if the owner was buying 25k of booze, and they only reported 30k of sales, they had income imputed by the Department of Revenue. Cigarette machines would have a much more conservative split, but pool tables, juke boxes, and other vending machines were a license to steal. Now in most states you are seeing video poker machines legally being placed in bar business. They are usually limited to five, but I am hearing that this represents over half their income, and most States have cut the vending company out of the split.

2seaoat wrote:You did not get the split correct.  They would take the cash and half of it was taken off the table.  The other half was split and with half going to the business owner and half went to the vending company.   Half of that cash was never reported by either business.

Sometimes they took even more than the first half off the table.  lol
And very often with the slot machines,  the local sheriff's cut was taken off the table before the split was even made.  lol
That was especially true on the Mississippi gulf coast where I did a lot of buying back then.  Right up until the time of legal gambling in Mississippi,  there were slot machines all over the coast.  And in most all cases,  the cops were being "juiced" to look the other way.

All the bar owners and private club owners formed what they called the council of clubs. Its sole purpose was to juice the local LEO so when the state police would plan a raid they could get the illegal machines off the premises. Everybody got their cut.

An old slot machine operator in south Lousiana told me how it was done in his parrish.
Once a week at a scheduled time in the morning, all the guys running slots in that parrish were expected to show up at the sheriff's home for "coffee".
He had a safe sitting in his living room with it's door open. They would all casually throw envelopes with money into the safe.
He told me about how one morning he didn't make it to the "coffee". And about an hour later a sheriff's deputy showed up at his door telling him "the sheriff was very disappointed that you didn't make it for coffee this morning". lol

I have an interesting artifact hanging in a tree in my backyard.

After the Johnson Act in 1951 outlawed the interstate transportation of slot machines,  they disappeared locally.  The local authorities really cracked down on them and to avoid having them in their possession when the raids were coming,  most of the local guys buried them.  I've been hearing for years how a whole lot of them were buried behind a house in North Hill as one example.  And I imagine many of them were dumped in the bays and bayous.

But years ago when the News Journal built it's printing plant,  the excavation uncovered an old slot machine mechanism buried in the ground.
A News Journal  employee I knew got ahold of that thing for me at the time and it was rusted out so I hung it in the bow of a pecan tree in my yard.  The tree has now grown around it and it's embedded in the tree.  lol

Mr Ichi wrote:There were Slot Machines very very close to Sanders Beach even in the laste 80s early 90s. maybe be even later. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.  Nuff said.  LOL

I never had any personal knowledge of it, but I've been told by people in the know that Bill Davis operated a route of his own slot machines in the north end of the county even while he was sheriff.

Love the history..very interesting Bob.

chrissy could you  add JukeBox to the thread title?