Adventures of a Used-Record Dealer
Just about anywhere in Maine, a drive in the country or a leisurely walk in town reveals the faded grandeur of old homes and other buildings, of fortunes made and lost to time. For the curious, and especially for the historically minded, each site can still evoke a feel for what once was, or what might have been. And occasionally a person can inadvertently get pulled inside the story.
I have a small record store in Maine that I’ve run mostly singlehandedly for nearly 40 years, primarily selling used records. I travel around the state a lot for my business, and I’m curious, as well as historically minded.
When the COVID pandemic finally seemed to wane, I was invited to an old house in a remote coastal enclave known for its art scene to look at some records being offered for sale. My contact was a guy from Massachusetts who wouldn’t make a move without consulting with his brother, who lived “out west.”
On a nice spring day, with the aid of a map and some directions I’d scribbled down, I pulled into the dooryard of a rambling, 200-year-old house that stood alone, just outside the nearest town. Like many others its age around Maine, this house was built according to a standard that must have afforded some convenience in a four-mile-an-hour world, but by modern sensibilities it was a little too close to the road. There were two cars in the yard: one with Massachusetts plates, the other Colorado.
My knock on the door summoned a portly, aging hippie wearing a sweaty t-shirt and worn overalls, with a fringe of thin white hair to his shoulders and an unkempt white beard down to his chest. He introduced himself as my man from Massachusetts. Greetings were cordial, and he casually introduced me to his wife, who was picking away at a pile of books nearby in the large entryway.
As I began to take in the scene, a guy of a similar age, but with a clipped and purposeful demeanor, darted through the foyer. The brother with the Colorado plates? Clipped Guy flitted by without a word, and the hippie didn’t even glance at him. I also noticed another woman in the next room opening and peering into some of the big, bulging, black trash bags piled in front of her.
Built on a grand scale in the late 1700s and painted white, with black shutters, the house was not an unusual sight in rural Maine. Also not unusual were the peeling paint and sagging windows showing decades of neglected maintenance.
Before getting to the business I was there for, I was given a brief tour of the grounds. The weather gods were smiling that day, and we were bathed in gorgeous, sparkling, early-summer light. The setting was beautiful, with a small, lovely, and very old apple orchard sloping gently away from the house on its sunny south side, and a small pond just beyond, all surrounded by old stone walls in various stages of disrepair. The grass was still the fresh green of spring and the apple trees were in full bloom. Whether I got any records or not, it was just great to be alive in that place, at that time.
During this short tour of the property, the enigmatic man I’d seen earlier came out and gave me the courtesy of introducing himself as my contact’s brother. They both seemed relaxed out in the warm air. It was explained to me that, as I’d suspected, the house and its contents had belonged to their late father, and they were there to clean the place out and get it ready for sale.
Back inside, the brothers led me into the room where the records were stored: a few thousand titles neatly and properly arranged on shelves, all turned and facing the same way so the spines were easy to read. This is usually a sign that gives me some optimism. But once I’d settled in and begun to inspect the records, the peace between the brothers evaporated, dark memories flared as if by spontaneous combustion, and bitter accusations flew between the two.
In e-mails my man from Mass. had sent during lockdown, he’d given me some background. The brothers were born in New York City and had spent their early childhoods living in privilege on the Upper West Side, the sons of a well-heeled corporate executive. In the early 1960s, when the boys were about eight and eleven years old, their father bought property Down East and wrenched his family out of their posh, urbanite lifestyle, transplanting them hundreds of miles away to a spot that was remote even by Maine standards. It was like traveling back in time, and for the kids, it became a living nightmare.
I try not to form expectations when I get these calls, finding motivation solely in the prospect of discovering something worthwhile. This contact had vaguely mentioned “a lot of classical,” and given the arty locale, I was hopeful there’d be some good stuff. Most of what they had was in respectable condition, but the entire lot was on very common “budget” labels — second-rate performances with mediocre sound quality, all likely reflecting the interests of someone trying to make a show of their appreciation for important music as cheaply as possible.
The bickering brothers were present enough to sense my interest was slipping away, and since their common purpose was to empty the house, I could also tell they were anxious to fob off on me whatever else they could. So, together, they enthusiastically urged me to have a good look around the rest of the house, as “everything” was for sale — it all had to go! Clipped Guy offered me a guided tour.
As my tour of the house began, I sensed my guide was navigating an allegorical mind-map of long-suppressed anger and seething resentment. Throughout the house there was glaring evidence of half-baked attempts over the centuries to update antiquated, obsolete facilities and features to whatever modern standards were at the time. My guide blackly pointed out every failed attempt to modernize the home between gloomy accounts of how out-of-place he and his brother had felt there as kids. Their background and expectations had made it very hard to adjust and make friends. They’d been spoiled in New York and hadn’t known it, and suddenly life was unfair beyond belief.
In the kitchen was a spotlessly clean, enormous, wood-burning, cast-iron cookstove in the ostentatious style of the 1880s, coal-black and elaborately decorated with gleaming nickel-plated accents. This appliance was the only visible means of cooking anything, and I heard a low groan as we entered the room. Maintaining this stove’s resplendent appearance and keeping it supplied with wood daily must have been a full-time job. In fact, it was two. Clipped Guy described how, being the younger brother, it had been his job to keep the stove clean, polished, and in proper working order. His older brother was responsible for keeping the wood supply stocked after a local lumberman made his regular deliveries.
Another shoddy attempt to upgrade the place: a little makeshift closet right next to the stove that contained a flush toilet — no doubt a slight improvement of the original “one-holer.” It was the kids’ job to clean that, too, and they took turns.
The central heating system, likely installed during the Jazz Age, heated only a couple of the more prominent rooms on the ground floor through floor vents connected via large, antiquated ducts to a massive cast-iron furnace in the basement. Originally, the furnace was probably coal-fired, then converted to oil around the dawn of rock and roll. Heating elsewhere was achieved with smaller woodstoves, strategically placed and connected to the home’s many chimneys. Each of those stoves had to be routinely cleaned and stocked with wood, and I’m sure you can guess who did those chores.
On the second floor, the two adults and two boys shared a toilet and sink stuck in a tiny room carved out of two adjoining bedrooms, each of which was accessible only by passing through the water closet. Since this “bathroom” was too small to bathe in, there was an old clawfoot tub plunked down randomly, in plain sight, in one of the bedrooms. The plumbing for all this was state-of-the-art in the 1920s.
The basement turned out to be the high point of the tour. I’d expected hazardously low ceilings and cramped, musty space. Instead I was in a roomy cellar of artfully built brick barrel vaults. Like an industrial museum, it was full of all kinds of ancient machines. Most of them were hard to identify, built before electric motors were invented and operated either by levers or foot pedals, with elaborate mechanisms designed to maximize leverage. Most of them were also painted a glossy black, perhaps so their polished steel cutting edges would shine as a warning, like the brightly colored bands on a coral snake.
Clipped Guy was ready with dreadful explanations and comments on each piece, including presses for bookbinding, other presses for processing handmade paper, industrial paper-cutters, assorted heavy woodworking equipment, other equipment for processing wool, and variously sized looms. Large stocks of raw materials for each machine were also at hand. My guide described the biggest and bulkiest machines as “spectacular pieces,” which I took with a grain of salt, figuring those were the items they were most desperate to get rid of.
Winston Churchill said success is the ability to move from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm — a quote my guide either never heard or didn’t believe. “He never made a dime with any of it,” he bitterly said of his father, broadly gesturing at the historical society’s worth of antiquities gathering dust all around us.
A lot of that stuff was so unusual, and just interesting enough, that I briefly wished I could conjure some justification to take it off their hands. But fortunately — on this occasion, at least — my sensible side bested the loony side.
The rest of the tour consisted of a miscellaneous accumulation of clothes, magazines, books, and dilapidated furniture. And more piles of big, bulging, black trash bags, contents unknown. Eventually I wound up back in a room with both brothers, where they persuaded me to take the records — just as a favor, no cash exchanged.
The irony of it all was not lost on me — the rancor, dysfunction, and relative squalor of this old home, all camouflaged by its idyllic setting, just up the street from a quaint and scenic harbor. The Summer People drove right past this house along the only road in and out of town, on their way to and from their fresh-caught seafood lunches, seeing only what they wanted to see.
As I packed the records and moved them out, I left the brothers sniping at each other over what once was and all the things that never were.
