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a lot of those guys, a lot of whom were much older than I was. It was a much older generation, but

they found it fascinating that somebody my age was interested in all that stuff, so they would help
me a little bit and sell me records here and there and it just went from there.

BiTS: It sounds as though a career kind of crept on you. Did you have any career in mind? What
were you planning to do after you left school? You clearly didn't do it.

JT: I had two jobs when I was in high school, well three. I had the job of helping my father to get

rid of all this stuff from the grandparents and he paid me a little bit of money for that, so I had
money to buy some records. Then I got a job at Disneyland in Southern California, just flipping
hamburgers and I had more record money from doing that and that was good because it gave me a
flexible schedule. You could kind of schedule when you
wanted to work, and I didn't want to work on the weekends.
I wanted to go to flea markets in the weekends, so I was one
of the ones that wanted to work during the week while their

other employees all wanted the weekend off, and I wanted
the weekend off too, but I would work whatever shift so that
I could get the time off to go to the flea markets and yard
sales. And my third job, which I got when I was in high
school, was being a sound engineer for Groucho Marx. And

that came about because of my connection to the novelty
records and liking all that vintage comedy stuff and liking
Groucho Marx
Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers and all those 30s
comedians. I found some very rare recordings at one of the
flea markets by Groucho Marx and the Marx Brothers and
being very enterprising, I thought well, maybe I could meet
him – he's still alive, so I found his agent in California and

said hey, I have all these radio programmes from the 30s. Do
you guys have any interest in that? The agent didn't really know what I was talking about, but he
passed the word along, and the next day I got a call being invited to lunch with Groucho Marx. He
was in his 80s at that point but still relatively mentally okay, and I got hired by his people to do
audio recording and transfer of original records and different things.

BiTS: What a wonderful story. I've never heard that bit about you before. That's absolutely terrific.

JT: [Chuckling] I did that for two years until he died and then that was the end of that, from 1975
to 1977, that was my job. In addition to looking for records, I was doing all that stuff and that was
the last so-called real job I had because when he passed away, by that point, I was running ads in
national publications, Goldmine Magazine and different places, to sell vintage records and so I sold
a lot of stuff that way and it became a business which it still is, although I still am a collector of the
early blues stuff.

BiTS: Wow, that's an absolutely amazing story. I guess the career, like I said, crept up on you. Tell
me something about how you moved on with that. I understand you've got an enormous number of
records that you store yourself. Where do you keep them?

JT: Well, for a long time, I had them all over the place. I had them in storage lockers. I had them in
the garage. I had them wherever I could find a place to put them, and after a while, it became

impossible to work with that kind of amount of records because you couldn't find anything. Nothing
was in the same place. It was so full. Everywhere was hard to organise and so about seven years