Married to a Coinop Picker is Moving

You can now visit this blog at the new location: http://www.pickerswife.com

I hope you like the new look!

Please let me know if you have any problems with the new site.

Thanks! Sheree

Picking Penny Scales: Featured Collector Jeff Storck

Saturday morning, after finishing my "Barn Fresh" post, I asked Lloyd to call our friend, Jeff Storck, to see if we could come by for a visit. I wanted to do a story about an amazing home collection and Jeff's penny scale collection immediately came to mind. Jeff had been in touch with Lloyd recently about some penny scales that he was ready to sell, so it was the ideal destination for us both. Jeff was happy to meet with us, so we headed out into the beautiful Loudoun County, Virginia countryside.

Crossing the Potomac River on White's Ferry into Virginia

We enjoyed the ride over the green rolling hills, autumn foliage just beginning to peak through, as we cranked up Bluesville on the radio and held hands.

Jeff has a few secluded acres that can't be seen from the road, and this is the view that greeted us as we entered his property.

Jeff and his wife, Liz, came out to meet us and brought us inside to chat for a few minutes before Lloyd and Jeff got down to discussing what he was ready to sell.

 Here are a few shots of the Storck's kitchen. As you can see, Jeff picks up a few signs in his hunt for penny scales.

 

Jeff has been collecting scales for 30 years. He started his collection with small candy scales and grocer scales when he lived in California. He says the larger penny scales were harder to find out west. When he moved to Virginia, he had about 50 scales. Now that number is closer to 450! That is quite amazing, considering that Jeff has a full time job that has nothing to do with collecting. Jeff's wife, Liz, told me that when she first met Jeff,  "He would buy anything that looked or even smelled like a scale." Now that he is nearing retirement, he wants to cull the collection down to the best of the best because he realized that he will never have the time to restore all of the scales he has. That is where Lloyd comes in. We are here to take those scales off Jeff's hands. 

So we headed outside to the first outbuilding to begin the deal. 

Lloyd agreed to take everything in that first building, with the exception of two scales!

Then we headed over to the next shed to see more. 

I needed to watch my step, getting into that shed!

It was worth it, though!

And if you are thinking, that was a lot of scales, wait! Next he took us to a trailer for more.

These were all just the scales that had not yet been restored. The best was yet to come! Jeff took us to a building he had constructed on his property, just for the purpose of storing scales and working on them. Lloyd says that Jeff probably has one of the best scale collections in the world, and you don't have to love scales to appreciate the incredible array of styles that he has acquired. 

Jeff likes to have every color of each style!

In this room, Jeff has valet scales that did not take a coin, but instead were purchased for use in private homes. 

In this video, Jeff shows the valet scales and how they were used

You might think that there couldn't be more, but there was. Next, we headed to Jeff's basement to see the very best of his collection. 

Watch this video to hear Jeff narrate the story of some of the best scales in his collection 

We concluded our tour with some of Jeff's most whimsical scales. Jeff had scales in the shapes of soda bottles, milk cartons, Mr Peanut and Humpty Dumpty. Those had been manufactured by an advertising company in Ohio. Jeff told us that the Humpty Dumpty scale had been manufactured for an amusement park in Louisville, KY. He had only seen a picture of one until a man called him who had one. Jeff said negotiations for that one took 3 weeks, "and every time I talked to him, the price went up!" That made me laugh. We know what that's like!

Lloyd and Jeff concluded their deal and Lloyd loaded a few of his purchases into the back of our pickup truck. A trailer will be sent back next week to pick up the rest of our purchases. 

If you would like to learn more about penny scales and the history of their use and production, visit this website: http://www.theamericanweigh.com/media/media_coverage/AmericanProfile-1.2.2011.pdf

We thanked our gracious hosts for the tour and their time and we headed down the road. Our next stop was a roadside bakery / art gallery / winery , where we bought a couple of delicious pies and a couple of bottles of wine to take to Lloyd's eldest daughter and her family. Lloyd couldn't wait to upload photos of his new penny scales to Facebook! Check out those photos at http://www.facebook.com/coinopwarehouse .

If you have a collection that you would like us to visit (or buy!) or share in a post, email me with photos to pickerswife@gmail.com.

Barn Fresh

Pickers will often speak of "barn fresh" merchandise. What does that really mean? If you pick, you already know!

We aren't talking about where the item was found, necessarily, but the presence of wildlife in or on it. Animals love to make their homes inside arcade equipment that has been left sitting,undisturbed, nearly anywhere.

Picking can be hazardous work for many reasons. Some of the animals that pickers encounter when they try to load up and transport their finds certainly count as hazardous.

When we were located at Mulberry St, Ben was unloading an old Bally Champion horse ride that we had bought out of a field in Pennsylvania.  The field was full of underbrush and located near a stream.  As Ben put the machine on a dolly, a customer that was standing nearby said,  "Watch out!  There is a snake coming out of the bottom!"  Out came a copperhead snake that was not too happy to have taken a long ride back to Maryland! Snakes love to get inside the base of kiddie rides and other machines because they often have mice in them to eat.

Last year, Lloyd was outside of an old building in rural Mississippi where a lot of old 50s jukeboxes had been dumped.  There were thousands of dollars worth of good parts even though they had been outside for over 30 years, and he was sifting through and taking what he could resell. Suddenly he looked in front of him, and not ten feet away was a water moccasin with the biggest diameter of any snake outside of a zoo that he had ever seen.  Lloyd quickly made for the safety of the building. The rest of the parts are still there!

Last year, when Coinopwarehouse was located in Gaithersburg, one of our employees brought a Space Shuttle pinball  into our shop that he had picked up in Bern, North Carolina and had transported in the back of one of our pickups. A customer was visiting the shop and had brought his dog with him. The dog kept creeping up to the game, sniffing it and then barking at it. Lloyd asked the customer, "What's wrong with your dog?', and he said, "There must be something alive in that machine or my dog wouldn't keep barking." Lloyd peeked inside the game and, sure enough, there was a live opossum in the game, none too happy after a seven hour truck ride. Lloyd moved the game out into the parking lot and opened a door in the game, leaving it there overnight in hopes that the opossum would leave the game during the night of it own accord. 

It did. The next day the game was ready to sell!

One of Lloyd's favorite opossum stories, from picking many years ago near Washington DC, is this one.  Lloyd and Joe Croghan, a dealer from Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, had found an incredible haul of good machines and records in a place called Mt. Ranier, Md. Lloyd's son Ben was pretty young at the time, and loved finding coins in the machines.  There was one room full of old vending and soda machines, and Ben kept busting them open and finding a lot of silver coins in each one. One of Lloyds friends had driven over to see the big find, and decided to open one of the jukeboxes himself to see if the coin box was full. When he opened the door of the machine, a mother opossum was inside with her babies and she jumped out to bite at his nose. Lloyd laughs to this day when he tells the story of how fast his buddy ran out of that warehouse, yelling, "Mary, mother of God!!, " and a stream of other expletives that I can't repeat here.   His friend did not want to come back in that place.

Rats and mice also love to make their nests inside machines, and leave behind their droppings. The corn meal used to make the shuffle alley lanes more slippery are especially tempting to them. A few months ago, Lloyd and I drove out to a home in rural Catlett, Virginia to pick up a Flipper kiddie ride. We had to drive our truck across a crumbling homemade bridge, over a creek, to reach the house, and I wasn't sure it would hold the weight of our truck, beside being so narrow that we barely fit on it! This place was remote, and had a "deliverance" feel to it, as the owner came out to meet us in overalls, no shirt, and bare feet. Flipper had been sitting out in a field for years. As Lloyd loaded the ride into our truck, little mice came running out of it. One of them hid in the bed of the pickup and then started running around in the back. We drove back over the questionable bridge and, worried about that mouse, we pulled over on the side of the road to try to find him and get him out. It wasn't easy!

Pigeon droppings on machines are common, because the pigeons often live in the rafters above the machines where they have been stored.  One of the best video game finds Lloyd ever had was in Frostburg, Maryland on the second and third stories of a building that was missing windows.  Chuck, from the Home Amusement Company that used to be in Rockville, Maryland, had already taken every popular video game title like Ms. Pac Man and Galaga, when he had gone there to get merchandise for his shop.  He didn't care much about collectors of video games, so he left behind the odd games like Atari Quantum.  Needless to say Lloyd was pretty successful that day, as the games left were the rarest ones that every collector now dreams of finding.  Ben literally had to dodge pigeons getting machines out of the place, and there was some cleaning involved before selling them, but Lloyd made a lot of money that day.

Bees, hornets and wasps also love to make their homes inside or near machines. Since Ben is allergic to their stings, he carries an epi pen with him now, after getting stung in our warehouse in Petersburg, VA and having to make a quick trip to the emergency room.

The machines we find often require quite a bit of cleaning up when they are shopped before they are sold or displayed in a retail store or your home, unless they were lucky enough to have been kept inside a private home before we get them.

What kind of wildlife have you encountered in your machines? Please share your stories in Comments for this post!

We Need a Donkey in the Goldmine

Lloyd and I often say to each other, "We need another Donkey in the Goldmine." We are not talking about hiring more employees. That expression is our code for a business home run, or a "big pop", as Lloyd calls them; the kind of return on the sale of one item that meets our quota for a week or more.

There is a story about our Donkey in the Goldmine that illustrates how to creatively finance a purchase.

Someone had given our friend, Russell, a 1929 Exhibit Supply Donkey in the Goldmine fortune teller. It contains a little mechanical donkey that travels into the goldmine, pulling a cart, and when it comes out it has a fortune card in the cart that is dropped into a chute for the player. If you want to learn more about this arcade game, visit this website, http://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=2578

If anything you owned were in the condition of that fortune teller, you would put it in the trash. It was damaged and missing quite a few of the original parts. Looking at it, you wouldn't guess that it was part of something so rare and valuable that even in that condition it was still worth quite a bit. It had been sitting in Russell's basement for some time, and he was finally in the mood to let it go. Lloyd had been hoping to buy it from him for while, but Russell wasn't ready to sell for what Lloyd wanted to pay. The trouble was, Lloyd didn't have a lot of capital to work with at the time.

Here is a photo of a reproduction, that looks like our original would have after restoration.

He had offered Russell $8,000, and Russell finally called up and said he would sell it, but he wanted $16,000. He wanted to give half of the money from the fortune teller to the man who had given it to him as he thought that was the right thing to do. The amount Russell was asking was more than Lloyd could pay at that time.

Lloyd thought about who could come up with that much money and would want the game in the condition that it was in. The name of a dealer came to mind. Someone that Lloyd knew would restore the machine beautifully and who knew buyers for the end product who would have the interest in it and the money to pay for a fully restored machine. He made the phone call. A deal was struck for $22,000.

The dealer drove to Russell's home and met Lloyd there. Lloyd told him, "Go inside and pay Russell $16,000 and load it up, and then give me the rest. He did. The machine was restored, as expected, and found a home with a happy collector, at considerable profit to our dealer friend.

When we first met, it was not uncommon for Lloyd to ask a seller to hold his check for a week or two before depositing it. They usually would agree to that, and he would hustle to sell his purchases quick, making back his purchase price and his profit before the seller put his check in the bank. It took confidence, determination, and a good list of contact numbers in his phone to make it happen, but he always made it happen. I have sat in the truck beside Lloyd on the way back from picking and dialed number after number for him, as he called each potential buyer to give them a chance to buy his "fresh merch," as he calls it.

Anyone can do business this way, if you protect your reputation and you don't sit on your rear-end waiting for the business to walk through your door. It only works if your word is good and you follow through on the things you say. The collecting world is small, and if someone gets stiffed or scammed, word travels fast. Then no one wants to do business with the unreliable character.

One day, I was having lunch with my friend. Lloyd called me to say he had an opportunity to buy the contents of a building for $30,000.  I paused. I thought. Then, I asked, "Do we have $30,000?" His reply?
"No. But I'll get it."  And he did.

That's how you get it done!

Featured Item: Cinematone Penny Phono

The featured item from Coinopwarehouse inventory today is the Cinematone Penny Phono.

Penny Phono 1939/1940

Last night, Lloyd and I were at Coal Fire in Gaithersburg, sitting at the bar for dinner and drinks as we often do on a Tuesday night. It's our mini-date night! Lloyd usually tries to leave his phone at home when we are having dinner out, but he brought it along this time because he was waiting for a call from an auctioneer. He warned me that when the call came, he would need to take it. He wanted to bid over the phone on an auction for this Penny Phono. I have rarely seen him so distracted, picking up his phone and putting it back down!

Finally the call came and he got up and walked outside to do his bidding. Success! Above is a photo of the item he won. Why was he excited? Well, here is the story of the Penny Phono:

The Penny Phono is the only jukebox ever made that ran on a penny. It only had one record in it and that record had 10 or 12 tunes on it. The records are rare and may bring $100.00 or more when sold today. In the day, the operator who ran a Penny Phono would go in to the location once a week or month and change the record. All he had to do was change one strip of paper in the front that had all the song titles on it, so it was simple to operate. They are very rare machines. They made two versions of the Cinematone. One was a  small counter model that slid into a stand, and the other was one piece. They looked very similar to each other. It is considered one of the most art deco jukeboxes and is popular with serious collectors.There is a second model that was advertised for 1941, that there was a brochure for, but no one knows if it was ever manufactured. 

Below is an image of the brochure for this other model

To see more photos of Cinematone Penny Phonos, go to this website: http://www.jukebox-world.de/Forum/Archiv/USA/PennyPhono.htm

When you look at the photos on that site, you will see that some of the photos were contributed by Coinopwarehouse. If you look at the photos of the penny phonos in the room with the blue walls, those were taken of a machine we bought years ago and those photos were taken in my living room! 

I am sure that we won't own this Penny Phono for long, but at least right now, it is still for sale, unrestored. 

Do You Remember Mulberry Street?

In 2003, Coinopwarehouse moved to Mulberry Street in Hagerstown, MD. That was the first time the business had been based outside of Virginia. It was a long, two-story, cinderblock building with a concrete floor on the first floor and a wood floor on the second level. It had about sixteen thousand square feet of space, when the outbuildings were included. There was a small show-room that was carpeted and heated, and a second smaller room with a concrete floor and gray cinderblock walls that functioned as a shipping room. That shipping room had no window, so was lit only by fluorescent lights hanging from the ceiling. That environment would challenge the cheeriest of temperaments! On the positive side, the building had 3 loading docks, which was really helpful when we had to load sea containers or unload the pickup truck.
 
When the business first moved to Mulberry Street, Lloyd had very little help. Ben was still in college, Amanda was still in high school, and I was still working as an elementary school teacher. Lloyd had no employees then. The building had no nearby commercial neighbors, so unless Lloyd was out picking, he was usually there alone.

Saturdays were the exception. Each Saturday morning we drove up to the warehouse to meet customers. Peter Hirschberg was helping Lloyd load up customer vehicles with their new purchases then. Peter was creating his beloved Luna City Arcade, which you can still see photos of online, and he loved the chance to see the games and to take them home to restore.

Here is an example from  http://lunacityarcade.com/photos.htm


Here is the arcade when it was still in Peter's basement, before he constructed a building for it outside his house. This photo is from an interview that can be found on the Luna City Arcade website.

Peter was working at AOL full time then, but is now working at what he loves best, game design, at EA games.

We loved Peter! He was always so cheerful and worked so hard, even when he was freezing! Unless we were in the showroom or shipping room, the building was always freezing in the winter, and well into the Spring, because those concrete floors held onto the cold. Sometimes it was colder in the building than outside. Lloyd used a heater that always reminded me of a jet engine, to take the chill off a little bit in the area that they were loading in.

While Peter and Lloyd helped the customers, I stayed in the shipping room to package parts orders or do Ebay listings. The operation was so primitive then. We were using recycled boxes for shipments and crumpled newspapers for packaging material. Sometimes it would take 20 minutes to find a box that a part would fit in, and my hands would be black from newsprint when I was done with packaging. I had to hand write each shipping label and each customs form for overseas shipments and then load the truck with boxes to drive to the post office for shipment. There would be boxes in my arms and on the floor that I would push along with my feet.

I told Lloyd that it was too time consuming to search the warehouse for suitable boxes for each shipment, and we acquired a collection of boxes from the post office for many different shapes and sizes. We bought bags of packaging peanuts and rolls of bubble wrap to improve the quality and speed of our packaging. Now I could get more done in less time and without black hands! If only Lloyd, and Ben (when he came home for a weekend) would quit stealing my scissors and tape and leaving them all around the warehouse. Every week I would come to my shipping table and ask, "Where are my scissors and tape dispenser?" and the search would begin for them. Sometimes it was 30 minutes before they were found! It was big place.

Lunchtime would come, and I would drive to KFC or Roy Rogers to pick up lunch for the three of us, and then coax Peter and Lloyd into taking a warm-up break in the shipping room to eat something.

Although Coinopwarehouse is now an Ebay Powerseller, back then we were just learning how to create an Ebay auction. I had a digital camera that we actually needed to connect to the computer with a cord to upload a photo to the auction. Lloyd always set the goal of 100 listings in a day, but it took so long to create one listing then, that we never managed more than 20. We gradually acquired better cameras, with memory cards, and made an arrangement with UPS to pick up packages for shipments. I really loved being able to print shipping labels on our computer from a database of buyers and get the packages picked up at our warehouse. We still used the post office for some shipments, and now they pick up at our warehouse also. No more trips to the post office, except to check our P.O Box.

We sold a lot of circuit boards for video games when we were on Mulberry Street. Green and prickly, they looked mostly the same to me, except for variations in size. So, when Lloyd wanted to speed through his Ebay listings and skip the step of attaching an identifiying tag to the board, it was daunting to sort through all of the items to find the one that needed shipping. "Please use the tags!," I would beg him. "I can't tell the boards apart!". He got on board with the tags, so shipments go much more smoothly these days, although I no longer do them.

After 3 years, our Mulberry Street warehouse was sold. Real estate values had skyrocketed and the building had become too valuable to hold on to for a business our size. We sold it, just before the market turned down, and it helped to put Lloyd's kids through college and to fund some home improvements.  He bought an old peanut warehouse just South of Richmond, Virginia to use  as storage for equipment and he worked from home for 6 months. Petersburg is another story.....

If you have photos of your visits to Mulberry Street, I would love to see them and upload them here! Send them on to me, please!

Picking in Cumberland

Today, the game plan was to visit an operator in Western Maryland and buy some equipment. Before we left our warehouse this morning, we had a visitor. Steve Ebner came by with a beautiful, restored AC Sparkplug tester.

He also brought us a few copies of his book, Vintage Coca-Cola Machines.

He even autographed a copy for Lloyd! Coinopwarehouse is now selling copies of Steve's book for $22.00, so you can order one from our facebook page or email a request to us.

Steve told us about shooting the photos for his book in two days, over the Christmas holidays while the photo studio was not in use. 

After chatting with Steve, we headed up the road, Lloyd and I in one pickup, Ben and Amanda in a 2nd truck that pulled a trailer. What a gorgeous September day for a ride over the mountains! Queen City was waiting for us with a great haul, we hoped.

When you head up into Western Maryland or over into the  mountains of West Virginia, you have got to get there before bad winter weather sets in. Those steep roads are treacherous for loading and unloading once it gets icy, and it can be hard to control a trailer on those slippery high mountain highways. 

We were hoping to get some of the best equipment in the warehouses we visited, but negotiations were tough and the operator wanted us to take his less valuable video games before he will part with anything better. "I'll sell them to you," he said, "another day." 

Lloyd and the operator made up a list of machines with prices for the first building, and Ben loaded those that would fit in Lloyd's pickup, up into the bed and cinched up the straps to hold them in place. 

Poor Amanda! It was her first picking experience, and she didn't know what she was in for. It was chilly and she had left her sweatshirt back at our shop. Vending warehouses are typically damp with the suffocating odor of mildew, dirty and piled high with every odd and end imaginable. We are all used to it by now and think nothing of it, although I admit the mildew is hard for me to handle. But you just never know what you might find! Anyway, next time she'll be prepared! 

After that, Ben and Amanda stayed behind to load up the rest of our day's haul into his pickup and trailer while the operator took Lloyd and I to two other locations. At the second location, we declined to take anything because it would have been too hard to get anything out. 

The third location was really interesting though! We were fascinated by some old Sax Fifth Avenue or Macy's window displays there. I know it's not coinop, but we don't care. If it's cool, Lloyd will buy it. Unfortunately, the owner of these items was not the operator that we were negotiating with. Our operator was renting space in a building shared by others. We will talk to the actual owner of these window displays later.

When we returned to Coinopwarehouse, I helped to operate our forklift to unload the pickup, while Dominic used the dolly to put the games in their place. Lloyd put photos and prices of some of our new finds on his facebook page as quickly as he could, and we headed back to Germantown to pick up some fettuccine carry out from Milanos Pizza and Pasta for our dinner. 

I would say that we all put in a good days work today!