Tales From the Hunt, Redux

Our friend Nick from Brooklyn is back with another Tales From the Hunt:

Besides collecting Jazz I also collected literature on record companies, music publishers, etc. I used to send out between 10 to 20 postcards a week, all over the United States requesting records. Companies and people that were in New York City or in New Jersey I would search out myself. I had sent a postcard to this record company in upstate New York called Chroma Records. Now many companies I never heard of and I did not have a clue what type of music they had. A couple of weeks later I get a tape and it says our latest release and the price, which is $2. It was Country and it was not my cup of tea. I go to throw the letter in the garbage and it gets stuck in my hand. To me this was a omen.Getting on my typewriter I wrote a letter explaining that I was looking for mostly 45 RPM records, like Rock, Instrumentals, groups. Some time passed, I get an envelope with 5- 45 records and the owner tells me they are 10 cents each. Four of the records were really nice, one was a rockabilly-sounding record, one was a blues type, a rock instrumental and the best one was a group that sounded just like The Beatles called The Kids and it came with a picture sleeve of them standing in front of a movie house. I wrote him and told him to send all he has of these four titles. After a few weeks there is a notice in my PO Box that I had a pick up. Going to the window the clerk tells me you have a shopping cart because there are four boxes and they are heavy. These were 100-count boxes. He had sent me 100 copies of each title, I sent him a check for the records and the postage. A week later I get another four and this went on for around two months. In the end I had 500 copies of each record, at this time I was doing a lot of trading with different mail order dealers around the country Bob Pegg, Shelly Weltman, Craig Moerer and George Greco to name a few plus a lot of stores in New York City, so I was able to trade most of them away for other 45 RPM that I could use and I even got some nice jazz albums for my collection.