Opera Music Part of Junk Hauler’s Treasure Trove
By John Kelly – The Washington Post
A record collection gets sold for $12,000!
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
The Discovery
The junk hauler figured they had to be worth something, these 15,000 black discs that filled an entire room in a Silver Spring house.
“It’s by far the largest collection in the seven years I’ve been cleaning out people’s houses,” Alan Cook told me as three of his employees lugged box after box out to a truck parked on the cul-de-sac.
They were 78-rpm discs mostly, and mostly opera. Locked in their dusty grooves were the voices of long-dead singers, from American soprano Bessie Abott (singing “Où va la jeune Hindone”) to Italian tenor Alessandro Ziliani (singing “Donna Non Vidi Mai”).
Alan has a deal with the people who hire him: His company, 1-800 Junk Refund, sells everything of value and splits the proceeds 50-50. But old classical records clog thrift shops and library book sales everywhere. When Alan put an ad on Craigslist he got only a few nibbles.
The Deal
Then a record dealer from Frederick came to visit. He offered $4,000, then upped it to $6,000. Alan wondered if the records might be worth even more. He accepted the $6,000 offer, but wrote an agreement that if he was offered more than $10,000, the man would lose the collection — but get $2,000.
And that’s when a dealer from Long Island called and asked Alan to describe the records. “Money’s not a problem,” the man said.
His interest piqued, the dealer flew down a few days later, inspected the collection and offered $12,000.
Alan called the $6,000 man. “We got a better offer,” he said, “but you just made 2,000 bucks.”
It would take Alan and his crew — Kennedy, Gilberto and Darryl (aka “Happy“) — another day to move all the records to a storage unit. Then there were the binders full of hand-lettered indexes to the collection, the opera books, the auction catalogues, the opera-related magazines and newspaper clippings.
“This guy loved opera,” said the junk hauler.
“That’s a good question,” said the Long Island record dealer, Larry Holdridge. “I don’t know. The singing. The music. Every voice is an individual instrument. It’s much more personal, I think, than listening to violinists or pianists, who in terms of style have individual qualities, but with singing, each voice is so different.”
This collection, Larry said, was not particularly stellar but he thought there may be some gems, a few choice recordings of the sort that get collectors excited.
And he should know: Larry sold many of them to the opera lover. “He was a customer for about 20 or 30 years, I’d say. Mostly Italian opera, rather than German or French. He wasn’t interested in collecting rare records, just things he liked to hear.”
* * *
A Daughter’s Perspective
“As kids we’d be out in the cul-de-sac riding our bikes and you could hear it, you could hear the opera, even though the windows were closed. You’d come to the house and you’d feel the walls shaking. It was just so loud. He just loved it. He would sit with either a glass of cognac or a glass of wine — he had special wine glasses, very, very thin — and he would drink his wine and listen to opera.”
That’s the man’s daughter. The last year hasn’t been easy on the family, and she asked that I not include their names.
“Sadly, he’s not well,” she said of her 83-year-old father. “He’s got Alzheimer’s.”
The man came to adore the music of Verdi, Puccini, Caruso through his father, who was an opera singer in Italy.
“I was a child of the ’70s and I couldn’t stand it,” the daughter said. “Quite honestly, to this day, I really hate opera. I was totally Beatles, Rolling Stones, all that classic rock. I remember playing for him the Who’s ‘Tommy,’ a rock opera, just trying to get him to say ‘Okay, I can see this.’ But no, never. We just had totally divergent taste in music.”
Her mother died four years ago, “although he keeps asking for her.” In the fall, she and her sisters helped him move to an assisted-living facility. It’s a good place, she said.
But what about his beloved records, I asked. How can he live without his opera?
“He has all his CDs,” she said. “Maybe 2,000.”
I hope he’s listening now, the cares of this world disappearing as the joys of the next one are painted in the air by a sublime voice.
A note from 1-800-Junk-Refund: We want to thank John Kelly from The Washington Post for writing this excellent article. We appreciated his efforts to come to the job site and report on what was happening.