In response to Andrew Barrett [110504 MMDigest], as a child I listened
to a cylinder music box in the home of a baby sitter (who was old
enough to have purchased it new) and to the instruments at Disneyland
and Knotts Berry Farm.

In 1982 I satisfied a lifetime goal and purchased an 88-note pumper.
It came with a dozen or so rolls and I assumed that that would be my
roll collection.  I was interested in the mechanics of the machine.
It wasn't long until I realized that I really liked the music and
I started buying rolls (easy at the time because many piano stores still
carried them and had a pumper on which to try them out.)

A few years later my wife and I had the opportunity to obtain an Ampico
piano and wanted it because we had heard Rhapsody in Blue on an Ampico
at a friend's house and thought it was great.  The music kind of drove
the piano purchase.

Since then we have purchased more instruments (orchestrions and music
boxes) and more rolls and disks to play on them.  We have also started
attending ragtime music festivals on the West Coast to hear the music
live and purchased many CDs at the festivals to listen to at work and
in the car.  I will be very surprised if this path isn't familiar to
many of the MMD readers.

Note that most of this music is not from my generation.  I was born in
1945 and "my" music is 1950s and '60s rock-and-roll.  My parents had
a very non-musical home.  About the only music I heard as a very young
child was country music and some popular music from the 1940s that my
mother's family played when they got together once or twice a year.

As I got a little older, I started going to a neighbor's house to listen
to her record player.  Her son worked for RCA and she had many year's
worth of records that he had sent her.  That was where I was introduced
to classical music -- still my favorite though I like pretty much any
kind of music.  My interest in ragtime and other music from before the
'50s came mostly from player piano records I got at Disneyland and, of
course, the rolls I purchased for my pianos.

My wife and I both took a few years of piano lessons and neither of us
plays.  I have recently been arranging music for my 31-note Raffin
organ -- not particularly good but it is fun!

Lyle Merithew