Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, June 18, 1993 TAG: 9306180207
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: ROBERT FREIS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: DUBLIN LENGTH: Long
If Marvin Cox's jukeboxes could talk, they'd recall enough tears and beer to fill nearby Claytor Lake.
Once these gaudy machines were the centers of attention at roadhouses, dance halls and soda fountains.
Nowadays they're obsolete except as a rowdy symbol of American pop culture in the days before digital radio or easy-listening elevator music.
Any ex-hotspur whose heyday coincided with the golden age of the jukebox can understand why Cox's Pulaski County basement is packed back-to-back by 40 Wurlitzers, Rock-Olas, Seeburgs and AMIs.
He's a sorcerer whose mechanical spells resurrect forlorn and discarded jukeboxes.
Usually they come to him in shambles. When he's through, they blink and blare like new, or like old, as if time never passed by.
For Cox, an upright, blue-eyed 70-year-old, repairing jukeboxes is a consuming hobby that would be lucrative if he could bring himself to let go of the refinished product.
But that would sacrifice the feeling he gets just by dropping in a nickel and conjuring up the past.
"I have a hard time selling one of them. It hurts me bad," he says.
Cox, like many others, spent some time leaning against a jukebox, "back when I was a young man and thought I was big enough to drink."
That ended in 1955, when Cox stopped honky-tonkin' as life's other responsibilities - work, family - took precedence.
An electronics technician by trade, Cox was considering how to occupy his time after his 1986 retirement from Corning Inc. in Christiansburg when he began to tinker with jukeboxes.
His affinity for the machines might have remained stashed and forgotten had a friend not given him a junked 1959 Rock-Ola.
"That got me started. I saw that was going to be something interesting for me to get involved with."
Cox soon plugged into an international network of jukebox lovers who communicate through trade magazines and schmooze at conventions.
He also began to accumulate junked jukes in his basement, along with about 12,000 old 78- and 45-rpm records. Cox lives alone now, with room to work and no complaints about clutter.
His favorite jukebox, a 1946 Wurlitzer, came to him after he saw it in a newspaper photograph. It was wrecked amid the rubble of the Pride of Radford Masonic Temple after that facility was blasted by fierce local storm.
He obtained and rehabilitated the jukebox. Today it's the pride of his collection, a giddy burlesque of shiny wood veneer, colorful kaleidoscopic plastic and percolating bubble tubes.
The so-called golden age of jukeboxes coincided with Cox's own salad days. That's why he favors the ostentatious machines of the 1940s and early 1950s with lots of fancy lights and decorative gizmos, a style that might be called "art disco."
"I like the '50s. Hank, Elvis, all the big stars out of Nashville. Ernest Tubb. Bill Monroe. That's got to be the best for me," he says.
Jukeboxes go back a lot further than that. The first coin-operated machine - a modified Edison phonograph - dates to a San Francisco saloon in 1889. Music historians generally agree the name "jukebox" stems from Southern black slang, in which "jute" meant dance.
Cox disdains post-1960 jukeboxes because they were designed to cover the mechanism that snatches selected records from the rack and places them on the turntable. To him, that's the most interesting part.
Performing surgery on a vintage machine is not for the impatient amateur, Cox says. On average, it takes six months of work to fix a jukebox - "If you do a good job."
Cox disassembles audio and mechanical systems and rebuilds from the inside-out.
"The only thing I farm out is the electroplating. My neighbor helps out with the spray painting."
Trade publications such as "Jukebox Collector" are handy for finding obscure or reconditioned parts, and cannibalizing other machines for parts works, too, he says.
"When I get through it looks like factory-built."
Cox gladly will feed a nickel to a machine and punch up a tune, beaming while Randy Travis sings about calling a girl he knew in 1982.
He sets up the machines to play six songs for a quarter, the going rate when he was young.
"There wasn't much else to do in those days," he recalls. "There was no TV, and radio was scarce."
If you wanted to hear some music you either played it yourself or went to a jukebox-equipped roadhouse. That's where you'd hear the latest song played in high fidelity or stereo.
And there, of course, you could order a beer and view the world through the bottom of the glass.
A sociologist might call jukeboxes a cultural icon. They've come to symbolize much more than a fancy music box. Certainly you hear them referred to a lot these days, especially in country songs, when the theme is good times or hard luck.
It's estimated that 50,000 Americans revere jukeboxes enough to be called collectors. Cox says he's just a small fry among them, but if he gets any bigger he'll need a new basement.
He's reluctant to say what a reconditioned machine is worth, for security reasons. They've appreciated at about the same rate as the cost of a tune, which over the past 40 years has risen from a nickel to 50 cents.
"Most of these machines have just been abandoned for 30 or 35 years," he says. "Bringing them back to life, hearing them play again - that's a great feeling."
by CNB