-- forwarded message, please reply to sender and MMD --

Dear Mr. Kravitz,  I have recently started to do some searching of
my family's history.  I am writing to you to find a connection between
MMD author Mr. Dick Bueschel, my grandfather, and hopefully someone who
has information on my heritage.

My great grandfather is John Gabel, of the John Gabel Company in
Chicago that manufactured the Automatic Entertainer jukebox in the
early 1900's.  Growing up I heard many stories of my great grandfather
and the jukebox; we even had one in our home, but I never had anything
in print to document the stories.

Recently on the Internet I came across the article, "Jukebox History
1888-1913" by Gert J. Almind, which mentioned a couple of articles
about my grandfather:

  1) The Music Box Society International ran a story in it's autumn
1984 newsletter (Vol. XXX, No 2) entitled "Diary of Disclosures of
John Gabel: A Pioneer in Automatic Music", by Rick Crandall.

  2) "Antique Phonograph Monthly" (Summer 1984 Vol. VII, No. 8)
Published by Allen Koenigsberg

I have not been able to contact anyone at the Music Box Society,
but I have made contact with publisher Allen Koenigsberg.  Allen
is forwarding me a copy of his article, and he mentioned that Rick
Crandall, along with Dick Bueschel, had found the diary which Rick
quotes from in his article.

I know that Dick Bueschel had written many articles for your
publication prior to his passing.  So I was wondering if you had any
contacts with Rick Crandall, or any of his colleagues that might have
some information on my grandfather.  I would be grateful for any
information you could provide.

Thank you for your idea about posting the message on MMD.  I look
forward to the possibilities of hearing something back.

Grant Gabel

 [ At http://www.ib.hu-berlin.de/~wumsta/rehm9.html is a concise article
 [ about John Gabel's invention.  Here's my liberal translation:
 [
 [ "The first jukebox with a song selector mechanism and audio disc
 [ recordings instead of the music-cylinders, and therefore the first
 [ jukebox in the present-day sense, was the "Automatic Entertainer"
 [ built by John Gabel in Chicago (Ill.)
 [
 [ "The instrument was five feet high and enclosed on three sides;
 [ above it was a horn with a diameter of over 40 inches.  24 records
 [ could be selected. Gabel put it into production in 1908.
 [
 [ "The reason for the failure of the instrument was its bad sound
 [ quality, accompanied by severe background noise.  Only after some
 [ technical improvements did the jukebox enter mass production
 [ beginning in the 1930s."
 [
 [ -- Robbie