Friends held a yard sale and told me their Waterford glass salad plates attracted no buyers. The pickers who showed up early that Saturday wanted vintage musical recordings.
Record fever overcame me the other Saturday when I wandered into a Charles Street retro vinyl store. I thought the 1960s had returned.
The allure of old music, its sound and packaging, is easy to appreciate. Old record players have cool dials and knobs. A distinct smell from all that plastic fills the air. The album cover art was designed to sell. The old tube radios and amplifiers seemed to transmit energy. I can see why there is a revival of interest. This music business was fun.
I often think of the personalities - and the culture - connected with Baltimore's record shops of the 1950s and 1960s.
The Radio Center was a beauty in the heart of Waverly. Its owners seemed to specialize in pop music, with a backlist of rock 'n' roll classics and unknown stuff, too. There were Saturdays when a local AM-radio station would broadcast live from its front window. The owners, older than nearly all their patrons, got into the spirit and filled the show window with cutout photos of pop singers.
What also amazed me was the Radio Center's sign over the Greenmount Avenue sidewalk. It was an oversized metal likeness of an RCA-Victor disc. Around its edges were neon Little Nippers -- the terrier that became a familiar corporate symbol. The Nippers blinked on and off in a progression around the record rim. If anything symbolized the joy of record buying, it was this sign.
The store's owners and employees were good sports about the quirks of the customers. On many a 1960s Saturday, I would be in the store with a neighbor and family friend, Dorothy Croswell. She was a music fancier - and radio listener - who would hum the record she was looking for in her loose, doo-dah style.
It then fell to the harried clerk to link her humming to the shop's extensive inventory. The music people were good at this. Dorothy often left the store with a record of the tune she had been humming. Watch out. Now she could really practice.
Humming tunes would not have gone over at downtown Baltimore's General Radio Record Shop on West Baltimore Street. It was owned by Benjamin Glass, a serious merchant who was the father of the distinguished composer Philip Glass. General Radio was a cavernous place opposite the old Civic Center. Serious buyers were allowed into its basement, a cavern where the really odd classical albums were shelved.
The staff had prodigious memories for catalog numbers. A woman named Rachel presided over the cash register. Her nails were lacquered red. She reminded me of comedian Beatrice Lillie, except Rachel was no comic about her job.
And let's not forget that for many Baltimoreans returning to the city along Russell Street, the Little Nipper atop a RCA wholesale appliance store was a reminder that you had arrived home. This piece of delightful roadside whimsy was bought by a collector who displayed it outside his Virginia home. It returned to Baltimore a dozen or so years ago and is now at the Maryland Historical Society.
