I found it very upsetting till I contacted the ARChive Of Contemporary Music and got a positive response. I could find people anxious to cherry pick through it but nobody considered the complete collection.

I had to consider what to do with my cherished, highly valued record collection. We are in our 70s and are starting to think of moving to a smaller retirement home. My wife, Ulla, suggests that if I ever want to collect anything else in the future I should consider stamps. It occupied a sizable portion of my home. “Eventually my collection contained over 22,000 records totaling I don’t know how many tons. Listening to these old records allowed you to gain a feeling for the era in which they were made. “I was fascinated by Bert Williams, a very popular black entertainer of the late 1800s and early 1900s, the songs of World War I, songs of the roaring 20s and many others. I started going to tag sales and flea markets and would often increase my collection by 1000s. The more I found the more fascinated I was. All the while picking up additional 78s when I found them. I went to college, became a research chemist and coauthored a number of scientific papers and several patents. When you put a human voice to it, boring history suddenly became real and interesting. When I was about 10 years old I found a pile old 78 RPM records in my grandparents’ attic. “I grew up in New Hyde Park on Long Island. Even better, the weeks we spent packing up meant cake and coffee everyday at 4. Rare for us the discs were all carefully arranged on shelves by label, and then by manufacturer number.

The collection of 22,359 ten and twelve inch seventy-eights is one of the first that ARC worked with from beginning to end, and what a pleasure. DESCRIPTION 78rpm shellac discs donated from Daniel McNeil to the Archive of Contemporary Music and digitized by George Blood, LP for the Internet Archive.

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