As a student at Southwestern, I had a roommate for a short time named John. He had a Beta VCR. When we separated, he kept the VCR, and I got most of the tapes. I fell in love with taping shows off of TV, as well as buying prerecorded movies. I graduated from Beta to RCA Videodiscs, because they were the first to have both James Bond and Beatle movies on video. I had a lot of those. I then went onto Pioneer Laserdiscs. The quality was superior to anything out there, but the selection wasn't too good. That was when I broke down and went to a VHS VCR. I converted my other videos to VHS and found that there was a wide range of all kinds of VHS stuff out there.
One day, I found a guy in KY who was selling Beatles videos and advertising them in a magazine. I wrote to him for a list. He sent a list which blew me away. He had hundreds of titles. Most were compilations of TV appearances, concerts, interviews, and movies. He had them pretty cheap. What he did was record them on blank tape from his tapes and send them to me. Over the course of a couple of years, I had gotten around 150 tapes from him. I also found other collectors or video and audio tapes who were willing to trade what they had for what I had. One guy in NY wanted all Beatles, and he was willing to send me Rolling Stones, The Who, Elvis Presley, Howard Stern and others in exchange. Another guy in IL had cassette tapes of concerts, which he wanted to trade for my titles. It got to the point that I was dealing with collectors all over the world. By 1992, I had the documented second largest Beatles video collection in the world. Over 1800 hours. The guy wo had the most was the guy from KY. Some of his stuff was used on The Beatles Video Anthology release in the mid-1990's.
It dawned on me that I could make a little money on these tapes, so I looked into the idea of becoming a dealer at record shows. I had tables at shows in South Carolina and North Carolina. There was another guy from Georgia who also sold videos. I undercut him in prices. He had better labels than mine, but most buyers didn't care about the labels. There were other dealers there who sold "import" cd's or records. At one record show, the show got raided by the police looking for illegal items. One cd dealer had his stuff packed up and out the door before the police got to his table. I just put my stuff under my table, and they couldn't do anything.
I did an antique show in SC, which lasted for four days. I stayed in a motel across from the mall. After the third night, I went back to my room and found my key wouldn't work. I went to the front desk, and they told me that my credit card had been rejected and they were holding my stuff until I could make it right. It turned out that the girl at the front desk had written my number down wrong. It was their fault, but they never apologized. I wrote to their parent company when I got back home. They never responded. That motel closed up not long after that experience.
I asked the guy I dealt with from NYC once where he got his stuff. He told me never to ask him that question. It seemed that he had connections with the Gotti family. I never asked him again. He later killed himself. His brother worked for the NYPD and died at the World Trade Center on 9/11. My friend was so depressed over that, because he watched the towers fall from his kitchen window. He never got over it. I sent a couple of tapes to a friend in CA. He was watching them at work, when his boss asked him where they came from. He protected me by telling his boss that he got them at a flea market and didn't know what they were. He told me what happened, and I threw a lot of that stuff in the dumpster. The other things, I converted to DVD. That took me three years. Then, I got rid of the videos and cassettes. I stopped trading with others and doing record shows. It just wasn't worth it. Besides, that dealer who packed up his cd's and left one show? Well, he was arrested for selling cd's to a record store and did some time in a federal prison. No need to go there. And here is another thing you might find interesting: I have never watched all of the videos or DVD's I got during this period. I said I would if ever I got sick and was laid up in bed, but the thing is that when you are that sick, you don't want to watch old videos. It has been over 25 years since I did all that.
One cool thing that came out of that experience was several years ago, I got an email from the author Desmond Morris. He wrote the best seller "The Naked Ape". He lived in London. He had heard that I might have a copy of a BBC TV program that featured him and John Lennon. It turned out that I did. He asked if I could make him a copy, and he would send me five of his books, each one from his library, and each one signed by him. So, I did. The books came in the mail in mint shape. Very cool. So yes, I had a reputation, but no more.
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