The man was like the proverbial kid in a candy store. He was oohing and aahing over an old tabletop jukebox like it was a beautiful woman.
Never mind that it was dusty and dirty and the piece holding the song list seemed to be barely hanging on.
That looks like rosewood, he said to his buddies a few feet away. He called one of them over. The buddy didn’t budge, so the man kept calling out and motioning to his buddy, who was more interested in the antique tools on the auction tables than his friend’s summons. The buddy finally relented and ambled over. He was obviously not impressed.
I understood the auction-goer’s excitement. Beneath the dirt and grim, I had also seen a beautiful instrument of music. I’m not sure if the wood on it was rosewood, but the material on the sides resembled Bakelite.
The Wurlitzer name was half hidden on the inside piece where the record list had dropped slightly beneath the clear plastic front. I could still read the names of some of the records – which may still have been in the jukebox – all handwritten in fountain pen ink:
“Clementine” by Bing Crosby, “Come to Baby Do” by Doris Day, “Weary Blues” by the McGuire Sisters, “Sisters” by the Clooney Sisters, the single title “Marlboro” with no name attached and “Just A Gigalo” by Jaye P. Morgan. An obvious misspelling of “Gigolo.”
I have come across floor-model jukeboxes before at auctions but not countertop models, not even the originals of ones you can now find in booths at those repro ‘50s-style restaurants. Most of the large ones at auction were in the same condition as this one.
This Wurlitzer Multi-Selector Phonograph Model 41 countertop was made around 1940-1941, and came with a stand that also bore the Wurlitzer name. It held a dozen 78-rpm records that you could play by inserting 5 cents in a slot, and it accepted nickels, dimes and quarters. (45 rpm records were not used in jukeboxes until the 1950s.)
The late 1930s and 1940s were the golden years for Wurlitzer, when the styles of its jukeboxes became classics, according to the website of the company that now owns the name, Gibson. Designer Paul Fuller created lovely art deco jukeboxes that used wood, glass and plastic along with rotating lights and bubble tubes. They are considered works of art, with the 1015 being among the grandest.
Several websites selling the jukeboxes said the plastic was called catalin, which looks a lot like Bakelite.
When World War II broke out, Wurlitzer factories made war-related products. With metal and plastic limited, most of its jukeboxes were made of wood and glass. The peak years for jukeboxes in general are said to be the 1940s and 1950s.
Here’s a YouTube video of a song playing on a Wurlitzer 41 and a restored jukebox with a stand.
The name on the back of the Wurlitzer 41 identified it as a phonograph, which I found surprising. A phonograph means something entirely different to me. Googling, I came across several interesting tidbits about jukeboxes, including that they were not always called that. They were initially called automatic coin-operated phonographs or automatic phonographs.
Another tidbit: The term itself may have come from the African term “jook,” which means to dance, or from the juke joints or bars where African Americans in the South would go to drink and dance to the music of black entertainers during the 1930s.
