I'm feeling old these days and I have been discussing aging with some
online friends like Doug Hershberger, who operates the roll perforator
at the Herschell Carrousel Factory Museum, and with Bill Black, the
retired dentist who owns Carrousel Music in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania,
and who used to maintain the Hershey Park Carrousel band organ, and
with Dan Wilke, who ran the QRS Old Roll Auction for two decades.
(I know "carousel" is spelled in this paragraph with two L's, but
that's how those businesses spell it.)

All this got me to thinking about my online Wurlitzer Roll Catalog,
which I started (with the help of Mark Chester) by putting online the
paper catalog of Style 165 rolls created by Californian Gary Watkins,
who had cataloged the rolls in the large collection of the late Ross R.
Davis, owner of the Griffith Park, Lincoln Park, and Tilden Regional
Park carousels in California and who was also the West Coast
representative for the Spillman Engineering Company.

Well. my Wurlitzer 165 roll catalog is now a half century old and still
going strong.  I wish that were the case for me.  I am 86 years old and
no longer going strong.   So I have turned much of the catalog work over
to my new Associate Editor, Andrew Lardieri, who is young and full of
enthusiasm.

The three other offspring of my Wurlitzer 165 Roll Catalog (my online
Wurlitzer 125, 150, and 180 catalogs) are still alive, although the
style 180 roll catalog is pretty dormant, because very few style 180
rolls were ever issued by Wurlitzer and nobody that I know of in modern
times has ever arranged any 180 music except Art Reblitz, mainly because
there are only two or three organs that can play 180 rolls.

C'est la vie.

Matthew Caulfield
Irondequoit, New York

 [ Look back upon good times, Matthew; as in New Orleans,
 [ "Laissez les bon temps rouler!"  ;-)  -- Robbie