You would think that Mr. Nicola Buzzo's thousands of magazines and photographs would have been enough, but those were almost a sideline. His main passion seemed to be collecting 33 rpm and 45 rpm records if his son Larry Buzzo's estimate of 80 thousand total records was correct. Many rooms in the house had shelves lined with 33 rpm records as seen in the photos below. Most of those were classical records that I figured had little value. However there were many motion picture soundtracks and Broadway show and similar records. Larry said there was an upstairs room and 2 outside storage sheds full of 45 rpm records. He said all musical genres seemed to be represented including country & western, rock 'n roll and so forth. The years were the same as the magazines, 1940s up through the 1980s. Larry said he was talking with the "president of the Richmond, Virginia record club" about buying him out but wanted to know if I was interested for a price of $25,000 for all 80 thousand records. I thought .31 a record sounded interesting but I never saw myself as a record dealer. I did buy about 150 motion picture and TV soundtrack albums however just to dip my toe in the water.
A few weeks after I had returned home I got a call from Larry. He said the Richmond dealer had come out but had tried to cherrypick him instead of buying the entire collection. Larry asked me if I would buy all 80,000 records for $12,000 which was about .15 per record. I was very tempted. I even talked to my bank about a loan and got an ok. So then I really had to decide if I wanted to go into the record business. I had no place to store that many records and didn't want to pay to store them. I did a search on ebay and found out that many records don't sell for significant money. I also didn't know how to grade the condition of the vinyl and didn't know much about which music genres sold the best. I finally decided that paying interest on borrowed money and a monthly storage fee while I learned the record business was to risky, so I passed on Larry's good offer. I'm sure however that a professional record dealer would have done fine. I heard from a friend that attends the Allentown Record Show that vague rumors were floating around there of a record find in Bluefield. If anybody out there knows what really happened to Nicola Buzzo's stupendous record collection, please let me know.
