Ouch!

I was moving a crate of records, sorting through so that I could give some duplicates to a new collector, and found a disc that I did not recall owning, an M (mint) copy of the Kentucky Grasshoppers on Banner playing "Makin' Freinds", probabaly the best version of that Jack Teagarden number. I carefully set the disc aside, and when I lifted the crate of "give-aways" My knee gave out and I lurched into the table on which the record was sitting, sending the disc crashing into the corner of a radio cabinet. The disc is now in three pieces.

Any stories to tell on yourselves? After all, misery loves company!

A friend once offered to send me a set of glass-based transcriptions of a mid-forties radio show -- it wasn't a unique, otherwise-unknown broadcast, but it promised to be much better quality than what was known to exist, and had originally been owned by the program's producer. But when the mailman arrived, the discs had been sent in the album the original owner had used to store them on the shelf, with no other protection -- the album was wrapped in brown paper and tape, with no outer box or padding. Needless to say the discs were shards -- and when carefully extracting the shards from the sleeves of the album to see if anything was salvageable, I proceeded to cut my left hand very deeply. Insult to injury.

Vitanola & Lizzie, sorry to hear those stories...

I've always been frustrated by RCA/BMG/Sony/Woever-the-heck-owns-them-now refusal to ever issue a "complete Tommy Dorsey on RCA Victor" set of reissues. They started in the 1970s with 2-LP sets which I think went to the early 80s before they "gave up & quit" around early-1939 or so in Dorsey's recording career with RCA Victor -- JUST WHEN HE WAS REALLY getting good....

(My first 78s I got as a kid were Dorsey 78s from my granddad's brother, and that's what got me interested in swing music, and then into the 30s-40s in general, so he's still my "mainstream music" fave...)

So I recently saw a set of 100 original Dorsey Victor 78s in GREAT condition, in Original Sleeves, from a previous Dorsey collector obviously, for sale as a set at a GREAT price on eBay. I did my usual begging, asking the seller to pleeeease send them in a Strong, Sturdy, Not Floppy box, with At Least Two Inches worth of SOFT, NOT RIGID, padding, on ALL 6 SIDES between the box and the records.

The seller sent the 78s in a floppy old box which I counted at least two previous addresses which had been covered over before. NO padding on the bottom or top, only padding on the sides.

I knew I was in trouble when I went to pick it up at the post office, and it looked like a giant bean bag, not at all box-shaped. It had been wrapped in TONS of tape because the seller knew the box was about to fall apart; the tape was all that was holding it together.

Opon opening: At first it looked like only the discs on the top & bottom were broken. But then EVERY OTHER time I thought I was going to pull a Whole In-Tact disc out of the sleeve, I would pull out a disc with a pie-slice missing, or half a disc. Exactly half of them were broken. I sent the seller pictures, and got them to send me a 50% refund of my purchase price, but...

I've been thoroughly enjoying the 50 which made it in-tact, and rarely think at all about the "ones that got away". The cup is HALF FULL.

OH, YEAAHHHH... I just started querying YouTube for some of the broke ones I had *REALLY* Wanted to hear, like "Let's Pretend" w/ Jo Stafford, and am finding some... Thanks, Vitanola, for letting me talk it out on your couch, now I have some youtube surfing to do...

- CH

[video=youtube;EYi4PDnxVr4]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYi4PDnxVr4[/video]

[video=youtube;-V6MIM-ywGE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-V6MIM-ywGE[/video]