McHuston Booksellers

Rare, Collectible, & Otherwise

Tag: new books (Page 37 of 91)

Baby, I’m not foolin’

November 30, 2014 /

Fortunately, I haven’t lost my touch for electrical repairs. That’s because I never had the ‘touch’ to lose. But – nothing ventured, and all that – I decided to give it a go. The project?

My Fender guitar rebuild.

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Some of you will recall my earlier antics, trying to put a music-store-reject guitar back in playing condition. It met with some degree of success. I really enjoy playing it. But it looks a bit of a Frankenstein on closer examination.

It is an acoustic – a Fender Sonoran model that I picked up on the cheap in an eBay auction. It arrived with the guitar body and the neck, complete with the headstock and the tuning keys. I had to find and install all the other parts, including the electronics.

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Got it assembled and love playing it.

Occasionally, I’ll plug in the cord and run the sound through the store’s music PA system, harkening back to my days playing with Led Zeppelin. (What? You don’t remember that? I was in high school, they were on the record player and I was in the bedroom playing along. Badly.)

I plugged the cord in the other afternoon and there was a crink and a snap, followed by nothing. The jack would not go in completely.

It was, as they say…Broken.

In for a penny, in for a pound, so I ordered a five dollar replacement, Genuine Fender Parts. Put the soldering iron on standby and at the ready. Opened the package on arrival, and low and behold – wrong part. As you can see in the image, it is considerably shorter than the broken one I removed. Too short to reach through the body of the guitar, in fact.

As I had already passed my patience-threshold, I decided to connect it up anyway. Figure I can get the right piece later.

There was no mistaking where the first of the three wires connected, so I soldered it into place. There were only two ways for the remaining wires, the right way and the wrong way.

Naturally, after unhooking the first try, I made the connection the only other way and plugged it into the amp. Bingo. Da-da, da-da, dum, da-dum, da-dum, Whole Lotta Love…

So. It has to be considered a partial victory, anyway. It has a lovely tone, which would sound even better in my brother-in-law Dennis’s hands. But there’s that wire hanging out with a soldered-on connector. Not so princely.

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Since the guitar and I won’t likely be making any stage appearances soon, the dangling cord connector really doesn’t matter much. And when Led and the boys call, I can get the little Fender all gussied-up to go.

We had a busy Small Business Saturday! Thanks to all who came out and supported us ‘little guys!’ We’ll be cooking again on Monday, so…

Come visit!

McHuston

Booksellers & Irish Bistro
Rose District
122 South Main St. Broken Arrow OK!

Ghosts in the Daylight…

November 25, 2014 /

Workers have uncovered a ghost on Main Street, while chipping away at the façade of the former credit union near Dallas Street. Not a scary sort of thing. More of a look into the past.

They are referred to as Ghost Signs – the painted ads on the side of a building or wall that promote something long gone. Sometimes they simply survive in faded style. Others are preserved by some circumstance or another. When the workers knocked the bricks loose, behind the facade was another wall. Painted on that now-exposed brick are the words PONTIAC – TEMPEST.

Even though Pontiac is a ghost itself these days, having been discontinued by GM in 2010, it isn’t so long-gone that we don’t remember it. Tempest, on the other hand, I haven’t a clue. There was a Pontiac Tempest introduced as a model in the 1960’s, and I suppose a dealer could paint the name on the building (although most dealers advertise their make, rather than individual car types).

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Carl Lea was the Pontiac dealer on Main.

He grew up around the corner on Dallas Street, the son of Charles Lea, who had moved to Broken Arrow from Coweta and managed a hotel – could have been the Hotel Mains, which was at 202 West Dallas, and just down from their home. By 1930, Carl was working as a department manager at the lumberyard. Not too many years later he was selling cars at Main and Dallas, the Carl Lea Motor Company.

In the early fifties, Mr. Lea was at the controls of some heavier machinery and his business was listed as Carl Lea Earth Movers, at the same 311 Main Street address.

He may have still been selling cars, but there was stiff competition on that block of Main. Fred Boren sold Fords across the street, and the Strader-Foster Motor Company gave test drives from their showroom in that same stretch of businesses.

Mr. Lea isn’t on Main Street any longer, but he left a little reminder for us, that came to light on a crisp November morning in 2014.

Those kinds of ghosts don’t worry me one bit. Then – there was the call from Lori at the BA Historical Museum. I’d called to ask who the Pontiac dealer was. She confirmed my research about Carl Lea, and passed along a little extra information I hadn’t found.

“Before Carl Lea, it was McHuston Pontiac,” she said, before moving on to something else.

“Whoa,” I said. “McHuston is the name of my store.”

“Mac-Oosten,” she repeated, and then spelled it for me. “M-little-c, C-U-I-S-T-O-N.

“McQuiston,” I said.

“Except they pronounced it, Mc-Ooston.”

And that’s close enough to McHuston for me. A distant ghost-relation maybe, showing up from behind the brick façade. Now, that’s spooky!

Changes in the air, so come visit!

McHuston

Booksellers & Irish Bistro
Rose District
122 South Main St. Broken Arrow OK!

Snow place like home…

November 22, 2014 /

Back when I was young and adventurous, and open to the idea of working in far-flung places, I wrangled a job interview with a radio station in Buffalo, New York. At the time, I had never been to the northeast, but figured I could find it on a map.

On another job interview, I’d been flown up to Kansas City to meet face-to-face, but I understood completely when the folks in Buffalo asked that I first complete a telephone interview. It’s a lot longer flight to Buffalo than Kansas City. Pricier ticket.

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So, after getting the introductions and explanations out of the way, the news director began the job interview. The first question put to me?

“What sort of vehicle do you drive?

Huh? My vehicle? That was certainly out of left field – or so I thought. Nothing about my experience or training. Just the vehicle question that had made me pause.

“A Monte Carlo,” I replied – which was the truth. I was trying to figure out some relevant angle, and wondered if I should bring up the fact that I had broken the oil pan on it while navigating a rocky trail in the Kiamichi Mountains attempting to reach a plane crash. No time for that.

“What do you drive in the winter?” he was already asking.

“A Monte Carlo,” I repeated.

“Oh, that won’t do,” he said, in a tone that sounded a little condescending.

“Won’t do?”

“No way. You know the kind of winters we have here, I’m guessing.” (I didn’t. I was young, living in Oklahoma, and happy to own a sort-of-still-new Monte Carlo.) He continued before I could stick my foot in my mouth. “Everyone on the staff has a four-wheel drive vehicle of some kind,” he added. “It’s the only way to get around.”

Now, I had witnessed snow before. But, in truth, most of the deep, heavy snow accumulations that I had seen in my life had been – on television. Maybe a scene or two in the movies. James Bond skiing off that Austrian cliff in The Spy Who Loved Me. A lot of snow there.

I was naïve enough to never consider that the geography of the job would present its own set of special requirements. And Monte Carlos did not fit the bill. By the time he finished outlining for me the amounts of snow encountered during a typical Buffalo winter, I had no desire to work there. I had no desire to even be flown up for another interview.

Thanking him for his time, I bade him goodbye and couldn’t resist mentioning how I enjoyed playing outdoors on Christmas Day with my newly-opened presents. Indian summers and all that.

Over the years I’ve heard plenty of complaints from folks about the humid summers we experience in our part of the world. Give me humidity over snowdrifts any day.

Just seeing the mountains of collected white on the recent news reminded me how close I’d come to making a big bad life choice. I owe that fellow a debt for starting that interview the way he did, so many years ago.

Otherwise, I might just now be starting to thaw out.

Chilly this afternoon in the Rose District, and a little breezy. Temperature? Sixties. Balmy by comparision, so…

Come visit!

McHuston

Booksellers & Irish Bistro
Rose District
122 South Main St. Broken Arrow OK!

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