Brea Pair’s Home Is Alive With the Sound of Music

Surprise! The music at parties in Jim and Debbi Shrider’s home in Brea is coming from a merry-go-round music box.

And from six player pianos, a reproducing baby grand player piano, some pumper and pipe organs or from a half dozen Wurlitzer jukeboxes, some worth as much as $13,000.

For the folks who love the musical sounds of the ‘50s, the Shriders play a Scopitone--a sort of video jukebox--that shows films of such artists as Neil Sadaka singing “Calendar Girl.”

Remember?

“We have understanding neighbors,” said Jim Shrider, 43, whose garage and house is jammed with automatic musical gadgets, many waiting for restoration. “I have so much to do, I’ll never catch up.”

He calls his collection “functional art.”

A one-time television repairman, Shrider said “technology changes so quickly it’s hard to keep up,” which is the reason he’s repairing and restoring old-time instruments. “The way they work doesn’t change.”

For visitors, the Shrider household is a challenge.

“We don’t have any normal furniture,” said Debbi Shrider, 29, who helps in the restoration work but who also enjoys wearing vintage clothing, which she often models at benefits. “You have to be crazy to live with this life style, but I love it.”

Basically, they enjoy entertaining, and their parties are always well-attended. “We want people to enjoy the music, and it’s nice to hear them say, ‘I remember when. . . .’ People really have fun going back to the time they remember so well and when they had so such fun.

“It’s amazing how many people will imagine they’re riding the carrousel horses when we play the merry-go-round music box. You can see them going up and down as though they were on the horse.” The music box was salvaged from a carousel destroyed by fire.

And the guest list is always expanding. “Sometimes we invite two people and end up with 10,” she said.

Although the machines are worth fortunes, “We get too attached to sell them,” she said, noting they plan to add another room to store more gadgets. Besides the automatic musical instruments, they also have antique slot machines, a machine to show how loving one is and a booze-o-meter.

“It’s great for telling whether you’re skunked,” said London-born Debbi Shrider.

For Jim Shrider, a member of the Automatic Musical Instrument Collectors Assn., the trick is in locating the old instruments and parts for them. “Either I have to make the parts or cannibalize one (machine) to restore another,” he said.

The real action to him is the restoration. “You can’t imagine the kick I get out of finishing one,” he said. “And then I get to play with it.”

After they marry for the 11th time this month, Richard, 25, and Sherri Bannister, 23, of Fullerton, will take a six-month Caribbean honeymoon cruise. Well, sort of. Actually, the acting couple get married in the final scene of “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers,” now playing at the La Mirada Civic Theater, and when that closes they’ll become a song-and-dance team on an ocean liner.

The couple were married for real in 1985.

Frightened by noise when someone attempted to break into her mobile home in Santa Ana at 1 a.m., Jeanette Burns, 55, dialed the operator--”I didn’t want to turn the light on to see well enough to dial 911”--who connected her with Santa Ana police. The cops responded quickly, but couldn’t find anyone.

“The big surprise,” Burns said, “was when I got my phone bill. There was a $1.10 charge for the two-minute local call to the police department.”

She said she called Pacific Bell “and I was told it was standard to charge for a call dialed by the operator.”

Penny Ford, a Pacific Bell spokesperson, said the company doesn’t normally charge for an operator-assisted call during an emergency.

Burns wrote the phone company, stating, “You can hang me by my thumbs. I’ll never pay the $1.10.”

She did pay the rest of the bill.

When San Clemente bought a new machine to do a better job of cleaning the beaches, it seemed that beachcombers with their metal detectors would lose their place in the sun.

Not so, said Capt. Lynn Hughes of the city’s marine safety department, who claimed that there still will be something left for them to pick up.

He put it this way: “It’s sort of like trying to clean out a bunch of weeds. You sometimes have to take some flowers, but you also leave a lot of them.”

Acknowledgments--Artwork by Gerald Burgess and Carmina Flores, Buena Park; Edmund Danyal, Tu Lee and Frankie Roman, Garden Grove; Lupe DeSantos, Placentia, and Lisa Castellenet, Los Alamitos, is being displayed in the Smithsonian Institution’s Air & Space Museum in Washington. They are all kindergartners and finalists in an Orange County art contest, and their work interprets space exploration.