Dreamland

Jukebox Surprise

I'm helping a friend clean out an old commercial building downtown he just bought. We're piling junk up in the back of my truck to haul off to the dump. "Here, gimme a hand with this old jukebox, " he says.

"You're gonna throw that away?" I ask.

"Yeah, it's pretty beat up, probably cost more than it's worth to restore it."

"I'll take it, maybe I can do something with it," I say.

As we're loading the jukebox on the truck, I can hear coins jingling inside. "Hey, you didn't empty the coin box."

"Yeah, I couldn't find a key for the damn thing," he says. "If you get it open, you can keep the coins, consider it payment for helping me clear out all this junk. You can keep all the records in it, too."

"Thanks for the tip," I joke.

Later on, I'm working on the jukebox in my basement. I get the coin box open, and find some old silver dimes in it. "These'll be worth a couple bucks from the coin shop," I think to myself.

Then I manage to open the locked doors on the storage cabinet on the bottom of the jukebox. Inside are some old records, all pretty common stuff, most look to be pretty well worn. Probably not worth much. Then I see a small cloth sack. Inside are a dozen or so silver dollars. The owner must have hidden these. I wonder what else is in here?

In the back of all the other records, I find a stack of a dozen 45's in plain white jackets. I look at the labels, they're all unused copies of the same record. It's a song recorded by Marilyn Monroe in 1961. "That's pretty obscure," I say to myself.

I log onto the Web, to get info on the record. It turns out it was a very limited pressing, only 8 copies were known to still exist! A collector had paid $25,000 for a copy sold last year at auction! I wonder if I should tell my buddy about this, or sell them myself and keep the money? After all, he did say I could keep all the records in the jukebox.