The Time Capsule | Roy Marshall

I was on Interstate 80 westbound, near the Casey’s exit, and a black Chevy pickup pulled alongside. His cruise was set only a mile or two faster than mine, allowing time for a long look at cargo I couldn’t stop looking at – a multi-colored Rock-Ola Magic-Glo.

There are only two jukeboxes in the world I can identify at a glance. One is the Seeburg M100 that Fonz controlled with a thump of his elbow. The other is the Magic-Glo, a sweetheart I owned for about six months and would, had it not been for the shortsightedness of youth, have in my office yet today.

Readers in my age range remember the Happy Days Seeburg. We fed coins to the same model before Arthur Herbert Fonzarelli showed us (too late) how the one in Al’s Diner could be manipulated. That juke offered 100 choices with the lightweight, more compact 45 rpm records, making machines like the Magic-Glo obsolete, which is probably why it and the 78s eventually became mine.

The word “jukebox” is said to be from the Cajun “joog,” meaning wicked, rowdy or lewd. Whether justified or not, it’s a descriptive word, more so than what we have for today’s devices.

Wurlitzer, Seeburg and Rock-Ola competed, offering entertainment without commercials, high-fidelity and a range of music choices too expensive to have at home, plus technical gadgetry that allowed a control box in individual booths.

Jukeboxes were a visual art form, a fact I was reminded of during the few miles we tailed the black pickup. The Rock-Ola, with a couple of tie-down straps holding it firm, was not presented at its best. It was easy, though, to imagine the way it was in the Main Street Café, the greens and yellows and blues coming alive, dancing neon with the hum of a carriage gliding up or down along the vertical stack, an amplified clunk as it stopped before the selected record, swung it into place, the rising turntable lifting to the needle arm.

David Rockola went to work at the age of 14. He was a bell hop, taxi driver, oil field laborer and, in 1919, began repairing coin-operated machines. He was good – good enough to design models better than those he worked on. Born in Canada, he moved to Chicago. Being a coin-machine wizard in gangland, Prohibition-era Chicago led to slot machines and a brush with the law. He abandoned slots, turned to jukeboxes, and put a hyphen in the company name because Rockola was commonly mispronounced.

Wurlitzer and Seeburg had the engineering, the sounds, reliability and function, but Rock-Ola offered glitz like none other. The Magic-Glo was a light show, a neon kaleidoscope. I expect some readers remember Rock-Ola’s Bubbler, with columns that changed colors as bubbles circulated from bottom to top.

I was 10 or 12, my uncle 10 years older. He took me to the drug store and we had Coke and peanuts (did anyone else do that? A fountain Coke with a bag of Planter’s dumped in?). He played the jukebox. I don’t know what kind of machine it was, or the song, but the fascination of watching the lights and the intricacy of the mechanism, the turning record, made a lasting impression.

A few years later, newly married, we rented a tiny apartment. The old Magic-Glo, abandoned by a previous occupant, was not just in the living room – it pretty much was the living room. A novelty and great fun for a while, wife decided a chair or sofa was more practical than the outdated big-band sound at a nickel a pop or six for a quarter. Landlord said to do what I wanted with the thing. It brought $25, and I never saw it again.

Or maybe I did. We followed the pickup to our exit and bid the Magic-Glo farewell, wondering not so much where it was going as where it had been.

Roy Marshall is a local historian and columnist for the Red Oak Express. He can be contacted at news@redoakexpress.com.