This Banker Has Discovered That Nickelodeons Can Be a Sound Collection

“Put another nickel in, in the nickelodeon. All I want is loving you and music, music music,” goes the 1950 hit song.

Anyone from the ‘50s can hardly forget that bouncy tune, especially Maurice L. McAlister, who owns 25 turn-of-the-century nickelodeons, which play paper roll records and were the forerunner of the jukebox.

Some of those magnificent music machines provide the sounds of many instruments in an orchestra, including a violin. You heard the music by inserting a nickel, as outlined in the song.

“It’s unusual to collect something that sounds good,” he said. “It has a ring-a-tang sound. I just love it.”

The machines are highly valued today, some costing $100,000 and more. “They cost something like $660 or $700 when they were built before the turn of the century,” McAlister said.

Along with his love for the machines and the sounds they make, “I’m concerned about what will happen to them,” said McAlister, the 62-year-old president of Downey Savings & Loan in Costa Mesa.

McAlister said he hasn’t decided if he wants to give them to a museum or to his three daughters. “But I know the machines have to be saved so other people can experience the same joy I get out of listening to them.”

Most of the nickelodeons, placed inside handsome mahogany and walnut cases by the maker T.P. Seeburg Co., are stored in his Downey home--one is ceiling-high--and three are in his Costa Mesa office alongside a player piano.

A nickelodeon in the savings and loan office in Downey is played daily at noon.

Some of the machines are electric and some are wind-ups.

“When we have a bank opening we send one there and it becomes the hit of the show,” said McAlister, who stays trim by farming the vegetables and fruit at his 2-acre home site.

When a visitor comes to his house, “I get a chance to play them all,” he said.

But McAlister doesn’t plan to buy any more nickelodeons. “I don’t have space for any more of them and I’m satisfied with what I have,” he said. “I don’t plan on selling or buying any more of them.”

However, “If I did run across one with a mandolin or banjo in it. . . .”

Kay Larsen of Costa Mesa, who calls herself “one of the boys” when it comes to playing bridge with male partners including her husband, Christian, says she has more stamina than her male card partners “but emotionally I don’t seem to stand up as well as the men.”

That is not to say she’s a liability, even though she feels her husband plays bridge better than she does.

Larsen has been the only woman to reach the California Contract Bridge League finals three years in a row. Her team’s best finish in the nationals was fifth in 1986.

The Larsens and Evan Bailey and Robert Rosenblum will make up one of three teams from California to play in the August national finals in Salt Lake City. “It takes talent, skill and endurance to win,” she said, noting that there is no money prize for winning. “The only thing you win is prestige.”

“How can we raise money?” wondered Vickie Kramer, volunteer library chairman at San Juan Capistrano’s Ambuehl Elementary School, where new shelves were needed.

She settled on a penny drive, and 230,000 pennies--or $2,300--later, the goal was half met. But the school PTA, so taken by Kramer’s effort and the generosity of students, parents and teachers, matched the amount, and shelves for 700 new books are about to be installed.

“I’m absolutely amazed,” said Kramer, who used a bathroom scale to weigh the pennies instead of trying to count them all. “It was kind of tough because my scale doesn’t measure ounces.”

She said five pounds of pennies equal $10.

Acknowledgments--Cindi Becker Lemkau, 35-year-old Fullerton College student, was named Designer of the Year after the college’s recent fashion showcase where five children, including her daughter, Heather, 8, modeled Lemkau’s award-winning Olympic equestrian-inspired outfits.