Jukebox Hero
Larry Reasor lives in a little cabin on a high patch of woods a few miles east of Post Falls.
His wife, Caroline, doesn’t own an electric can opener. She prefers washing the dishes by hand.
The Reasors revel in the fact that time has blown past them like an outbound jet. That’s an asset, says Larry, for anyone in his dinosaur line of work.
Larry Reasor, 62, is a jukebox repairman.
He’s one of the region’s last - if not the last - to still be plying this offbeat trade in a full-time fashion.
“People tend to look at me a little strange when I tell them what I do,” says Larry, who calls his business Early Restorations.
“But I love it. The thrill of fixing a jukebox and then putting in a coin and watching it play, that’s like the cold beer after a hard day’s work.”
Before we go any further, let’s make sure we have our nomenclature straight.
When Larry says jukeboxes, he doesn’t mean those modern contrivances with CDs and Dolby sound.
Larry is talking tubes and capacitors and black vinyl discs spinning ‘round and ‘round.
He’s an expert when it comes to these glowing entertainment systems of the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s. Those were the days of yore, when a dime or so would get you four or five plays of your favorite tunes.
Larry points to a 1952 Seeburg, emitting a rainbow glow in his living room.
“You put `Be-Bop-A-Lula’ on a machine like that and there’s a richness and a depth of tone that you don’t get on a modern machine,” he says. “It has soul.”
Repairman is such a pedestrian term when used to describe a guy like Larry.
He is, quite simply, an artist.
Larry once got ahold of a relic Rock-Ola that had been barbecued to charcoal in a bar fire. Within several months, he transformed it into better-than-showroom condition.
Such restorations are painstaking, tedious work. Larry doesn’t mind.
“Up here on the hill it might as well be the 1950s or 1960s,” he says. “I hear the Beach Boys sing, `Fun, Fun, Fun,’ and I get tears in my eyes.”
Born in Oregon, Larry learned to work with his hands when his father got him a broken-down Model A Ford.
Larry was blessed with a mechanic’s mind. He restored classic cars as he grew older and then widened his horizons to collectible toys, bikes, clocks …
“Curiosity is your biggest promoter,” he says. “It’s human nature to get in over your head so you have to learn how to get yourself out.”
Larry restored his first jukebox in 1978, a model known as a Seeburg “trash can.” A hulking contraption, the trash can looks like the Star Wars robot, R2D2, with a thyroid condition.
But Larry was hooked. Although he still spends a good deal of his time restoring and fixing other items, Larry’s true love is the old jukeboxes.
He currently is restoring a Wurlitzer 1015 for Spokane’s Brett Sargent. Known also as the “bubble machine,” the 1946 Wurlitzer is the holy grail of jukeboxes, often fetching $10,000 and up.
You don’t have to spend that much, however. Collectible jukeboxes sell for as little as $500 and here’s the good news: They still make reproduction records of nearly all popular songs.
Larry “has got more patience than anyone I know,” says Sargent, who owns several other Reasor-built jukes.
“There’s a lot of pieces in one of those things. And to detail each one by hand? A person could lose their mind.”
The fascination with these colorful machines is no mystery.
Jukeboxes follow a cheese-in-the-mousetrap formula. All the lights and all the color is there for one purpose:
To entice people into plunking coins into the slot.
They are crass moneymakers, no question. But the payoff makes the process painless.
“A jukebox changes your whole attitude,” says Larry’s wife. “It’s like the old song, `Magic Moment.’ You hear a song on a jukebox and you suddenly remember where you were and where you’ve been.”