While the Juke Box has been featured before on Curator's Corner and its picture will again appear soon in a "This Date" its visage was required today again as we reach April 1981. On Friday, April 3, Phil & Tee purchased the juke box at Ford Amusements on Howard Avenue, Lancaster, PA, for $350. If George and his main complainer, Mrs. Garman, thought it was loud prior to this they had a shock coming.
On the evening of April 3rd, with the juke box having just been delivered, Kenny and others began pumping in quarters - a whole lotta quarters. Wouldn't ya know it but a 340 broke out. On that evening, $12.00 in quarters and one thin dime were put into the juke box. (NOTE: for those not paying attention, here is the math; $12.10 is 48 quarters which equals 144 songs at roughly three minutes a song that is 432 minutes or over 7 hours of muzak!!!) After a slow day two, Sunday, immortalized since then as Masada (in commemoration of the ABC mini-series that debuted that evening) another $11.15 in quarters was jammed into the juke. It was some weekend debut for the box.
The $12.10 opening day record stood up through Easter if only because that blessed weekend's party was such a drunken affair that I didn't count the juke box money until Sunday and statistically I had no way of the splitting the $24 between Friday and Saturday; chances are pretty good that one of those two days exceeded the $12.10 record but I assigned $12 to each and the record stood for another weekend. Nonetheless, the juke box had played for 14 1/2 hours that Good Friday and Easter Saturday ... good Catholic boys celebrating the holiest holidays on the calendar.
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