Fresno resident Jim Bedoian, the brother of Community Alliance reporter Vic Bedoian, has a collection of 6,000–8,000 78 rpm records. The 78s are discs with one song on each side, each side holding a song lasting a maximum of three and a half minutes. The Golden Age of 78s was from 1925 to 1948.
Jim, who is 94 years old, got into listening to 78s as a kid, living on a farm near Sanger.
“Time goes very slowly out in the country when you’re a young boy,” he said, “and the only thing I would do is listen to phonograph records.”
“I instantly fell in love with the music of the 20s and 30s.”
By the time he was in high school, he heard one could purchase 78s at the Salvation Army store for a nickel apiece, and they had tables full of records. A collection was born.
Jim moved to Los Angeles for college and stayed on. Vic had something to say about going to and from LA with Jim, “If you were to drive up with him, or drive down 99, he would stop at every little town along the way and go to the Salvation Army, or some other secondhand store. It would take hours!”
Jim said, “I would get attracted to a particular artist and start collecting their records or their songs. I got to know more of the vaudevillians and people of that ilk. And the more I listened to it, the more I seemed to be attracted to it. [That was the] discovery for me.
“Because these were old records that I was getting, they would’ve been junk for most people. Record collectors like myself have been able to save some of these wonderful artists.”
In the 1970s, Jim turned his hobby into a business. He began to issue LPs featuring artists he favored, anthologies of a musical style or music from certain historical periods. He produced more than 50 LPs. In the 1990s, he moved into CDs. Finally, he made music available on iTunes, where he lists nearly 6,500 songs.
His productions featured top quality artwork and liner notes. An example is Hawaiian Memories: Vintage Recordings 1928–1941. The CD cover by Greg Parks is of a Hawaiian woman with flowers in her hair, holding a guitar, while behind her is a smoking volcano, the sea and palm trees at sunset. Sound restoration was done by Audio Mechanics and Echo Productions.
Ian Whitcomb wrote on the CD insert: “There emerged a hit called ‘On the Beach at Waikiki,’ an infectious snatch of melody and close harmony…proudly published by Honolulu’s own Bergstrom Music Company. Tin Pan Alley watched in fascination…[This] ‘golden hula’ was aimed at the haoles, and contained a degree of sauciness, summed up in the slogan ‘Honi kaua wiki-wiki,’ meaning ‘Kiss me quick!’
“Within a year ‘On the Beach at Waikiki’ had become a national best-selling song sheet while Hawaiian ensembles were on the vaudeville circuit spreading their good word all over America. They were especially influential in southern states where country lads took the slide guitar into their hearts so deeply that the steel eventually became associated as much with Nashville as with Honolulu.”
The version of “On the Beach at Waikiki” in Jim’s collection is a recording from 1934 by the Moana Serenaders. The listener, filled in by Whitcomb’s notes, can relate to what is really musical history in a song. The 78 records were, at one time, after all, the best way of hearing music.
Looking back, “I was doing it not for the money,” said Jim, “but for the enjoyment of doing it.” (He also noted, “I did make good money for a time.”)
“Trying to keep this music going for whoever still enjoyed listening to it, that was my goal, and I succeeded at that.”
