MONTESANO — In Bob Carter’s private museum of phonographs and radios, shelves are crowded with the technology of the past. Glass vacuum tubes peek out from between wooden panels, burnished metal and wood horns spring from spring-loaded turntables, and wax cylinders and discs sit on players, bearing titles of long-gone singers and songs that were popular about this time last century.
“I love old music,” Carter said. “I don’t really like modern music.”
Carter, 73, certainly has plenty of records to satisfy his taste — over 6,000, he estimates. Some of them are discs, others are rarer cylinders. And he has plenty of ways to play them; Carter’s Montesano museum holds the majority of his 73 phonographs.
The museum is the culmination of a lifetime of collecting and rehabilitating old technology.
When Carter and his wife, Cathy, moved to Montesano about four years ago, they did it with the intent of putting all of Carter’s players in one place where they could be shown and admired. The couple moved from Federal Way, where Carter’s marvelous phonographs had been consigned to the basement, where they were packed cheek-to-jowl.
Carter has restored all of the phonographs himself. A former radio engineer, Carter’s skills with tools have turned some very beat-up, dusty hulks into elegant machines, fit for an Edwardian drawing room. Take the phonograph in his living room; dark wood panels curve out of the turntable box with graceful, simple lines.
Carter gives the turntable a little push and carefully drops a needle, and all of the sudden crackly, sprightly band music bursts out. It sounds a bit tinny, and Carter cranks the handle on the side to correct the speed of the disc’s spinning, making the music jump in pitch and speed.
The music is a mandolin, Carter explained.
“I can’t believe how fast he plays,” Carter said.
Indeed, playing at the correct speed, the unknown player dazzles with rapid scale runs and melodies. There’s no label on the record; Carter would love to know who was playing, but it is a mystery.
Carter’s passion for phonographs runs in tandem with his love of old radios.
In fact, Carter probably wouldn’t have developed his love of phonographs into a museum if, as a 13-year-old boy growing up in the Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle, he hadn’t started repairing radios. His father was a radio repairman, and Carter still uses his dad’s equipment in his restorations to this day.
“(Radios) were interesting,” Carter said. Mechanically inclined, Carter not only turned his hobby into a business, he managed to save money from repairing his neighbors’ radios to build his own amateur radio.
Carter repairs radios to this day. A good friend of his showed him something she’d collected from her family a few months ago — a broken, rundown 1936 Art Deco radio with chrome and blue-mirrored glass. Carter popped it open, replaced the radio bits, cleaned up the outside, and now had the revamped artifact in its full, pre-Space Age glory.
Carter’s interest in phonographs really kicked in when motorized record players were coming into vogue. He just liked the phonograph’s wind-up ways, and the technology matched the music it played so perfectly.
The Carters have been married for a few decades, but Cathy Carter said she didn’t fully realize the depth of her husband’s hobby until one day, not too long after they were married, he told her he was going out to buy a few records.
“I thought that meant he’d be out for a few hours and come back with a few records,” she said. “But no, he came back half a day later with a truck and a trailer full of records.”
Cathy Carter said she has learned to love phonographs since then, and even commented on how it cemented their family. Her son took to his stepfather’s hobby and now he has 200 phonographs of his own. Of course, the competition has stoked a little rivalry over the years.
“We’d go into a store and see a phonograph for, say, $250, and Bobby would say, ‘That’s interesting,’ and the store owner would sell it to him for $100 or something,” Bob Carter recalled. “It was because he was a kid, and the people liked seeing a young person interested in phonographs.”
The trick doesn’t work now that Bobby’s grown, Carter said.
Buying phonographs has become more complicated over the years. In the 1960s and ’70s, it was possible to scoop up a good find at an antique store. It wasn’t always easy to find a deal, but it was possible. Witness Carter’s prize phonograph, a model from the technology’s earliest days in the 19th century, the 1896 Emile Berliner phonograph. Carter said when he and Bobby saw it on a shelf at an antique store they were both stunned, and bought the rare catch at a good price. “Both of us kept our mouths shut,” Carter said.
Carter said his museum is open to anyone who gives him advance warning. Like those dealers of yore, Carter said he’d particularly like to show his collection off to kids to get them interested.
“My goal is to get kids in here,” Carter said. “I love to have older people come in and listen to music they loved, but I think young kids need to hear this, too.”
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