Nation & World

<< Previous   of   Next >>   ADVERTISEMENT   Related Stories • On a helium high 7/6/08   CONTACT THE HERALD Do you have a news tip? newstips@heraldnet.com | 425.339.3400   Published: Sunday, July 6, 2008 Collector's 200,000 records donated Associated Press SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- A vast collection of 78 rpm records -- valued at $1 million, weighing 50 tons and representing more than a half-century of American music history -- is being donated to Syracuse University by the estate of a prominent New York City record shop owner. The more than 200,000 records represented the inventory of "Records Revisited," a landmark Manhattan store owned by Morton Savada, 85, who died in February from lung cancer. Savada's collection included recordings from 1895 to the 1950s, with big band, jazz, country, blues, gospel, polka, folk, Broadway, Hawaiian and Latin among the genres. It also contains spoken-word, comedy and broadcast recordings, and "V-disks," which were distributed as entertainment to the U.S. military during World War II. "It's a treasure trove of that era," said Joe Lauro, founder of Historic Film Archive, whose holdings include more than 40,000 musical performance clips and holds exclusive rights to such famous shows as "The Ed Sullivan Show" and "Don Kirshner's Rock Concert." "In terms of individual records at high prices ... there's not a lot of that in there. The value is that it's the largest massing of recordings from one particular era," said Lauro, who was befriended by Savada as a teenager and visited his store often during their 35-year long friendship. Even though they don't know what gems await them in Savada's collection, university officials were ecstatic about the donation, which boosts the Belfer Audio Laboratory and Archive's collection of 78 rpm records to about 400,000 -- second in the United States only to the Library of Congress collection. His family also donated Savada's collection of catalogs, discographies and other materials.

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