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My very first exposure to old music resulted when my paternal grandparents gave me at the age of four the Alma Gluck recordings of Carry Me Back to Old Virginny and Listen to the Mockingbird. Then in the mid-1950's, my mother (1902-1997) began a project of taking her sheet music from the early 1920's from the piano bench, spreading it out on the floor and taping torn and dog-eared pages, then playing it on our piano given to my parents by my maternal grandmother when they married in 1923. She would play such tunes as Ain't We Got Fun, Yes We Have No Bananas, Stumbling, Three O'Clock in the Morning and You've Got to See Mama Ev're Night or You Can't See Mama at All. I loved the the music and asked her about it and she said "it's the music Daddy (1898-1958) and I danced and listened to in the 1920's". In 1958, I began frequenting an antique shop in downtown Waco called Smith's Den of Antiquity in which Mr. Smith had a table with stacks of 78 RPM records for a dime apiece. I didn't know what to look for, but quickly learned that anything with the name Fletcher Henderson on the flag label Columbia was irresistible. The owner soon said "You need to meet Mr. Gottlieb!" So, in 1960 I met Mr. R. E. M. Gottlieb, then 51, who had begun his own collection at the age of 16 in 1925 when his mother, a housekeeper at Baylor University, gave him a table model Victrola and some records which a student gave her as she left for the summer. Every Saturday after that he would ride his bicycle to Thos. Goggan Bros. in downtown Waco to buy the latest releases, so many of the records in his collection were bought brand new and were in barely N- condition. By 1960, he had some 10,000 records filed by orchestra in shelves in one room of his little four-room house and another 1,000 duplicates which we played on a 1926 Victrola Credenza in a storeroom behind his garage. We played the records in the house on a 16" Rek-O-Kut turntable mounted in another Victrola Credenza cabinet. He had all the recordings of the major dance orchestras of the 1920's and some rare one-offs. Fred Waring was his favorite 20's band leader with whom he began a lifetime correspondence in 1928. In later years when Fred would visit Baylor for a concert with his Pennsylvanians, he would include a visit to Mr. Gottlieb's home with some of his performers. He started every day with a Waring's Pennsylvanians record. The first record I bought was Coon-Sanders Yes Sir That's My Baby and I still have it. For the next 25 years I bought, sold and traded records with Mr. Gottlieb. I always entered at the back kitchen door and he had a speaker mounted above the breakfast table that would be playing some wonderful tune. He would put a Dr Pepper in the freezer and check on it periodically, then begin to drink it when it was a certain consistency of slush. He would give me $3 in records to mow the yard or wash his 1947 Oldsmobile coupe with a gasoline soaked rag. I also bought records from Leonard Kunstadt's Record Research Magazine auction in New York and from Harry L. Lane in Detroit. I've also bought records for over 30 years from the late Mike Stewart's Green River Records auction, now so ably run by his son Jesse since his passing several years ago. Mr. Gottlieb's wife died in the early 70's and in the late 70's he had a series of strokes. He stabilized by the early 80's and remarried. He moved to his second wife's larger house and his son and two sons-in-law built him a record house behind their house, complete with heat and ac and didn't break a record! For a few years things went along well, but then he began having more serious strokes and began the process of selling his collection through auction, selling the jazz items first. Another collector friend bought the remainder of his collection and Mr. Gottlieb passed away in 1986 at the age of 77. I lived and worked in Dallas for 38 years, but sold my home there in 2005 and moved back to my hometown of Waco to the home which had been my mothers and I kept upon her passing in 1997. During the first part of 2005, I would make a trip every weekend with the trunk and rear seat of my 1977 Mercury Grand Marquis filled with albums, not wanting anyone else to handle them and, like Mr. Gottlieb, didn't break a one! This music is still just as enjoyable to me as it was when I first started collecting. For some reason, I can pick out some records and remember the specific details of when and where I got them, but others I have no recollection at all.