Magic moments collected on vinyl

The Wrights were the first young couple to move into my rural neighborhood in Aurora, Ohio, sometime in the early 1970s. All the other adults were ancient, at least in their 40s. They had grown up in the Great Depression, lived through World War II and struggled to understand the music of the next generation.

My memory is a little fuzzy on the Wrights because they moved away in just a few years. As I remember, he looked like Kent McCord from the cop show “Adam-12” and she was a statuesque blonde who stayed home during the day. I know this because she was charged with watching a neighbor’s house where we went when we cut school.

I missed 19 days my freshman year, but that’s another story. This story happened two years earlier.

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My other next-door neighbor, Ron, was my best friend, who called me over one day. In the room he shared with his two brothers we knelt in front of his closet. It was filled with all the things a 12year-old back then would ever need, most of which would probably be useless to a kid the same age now.

He reached inside the closet and pulled out a saltand-pepper-colored case with a faux leather handle. “Mrs. Wright gave me her record collection,” he said with a smile.

They were all 45s, and we’d never heard any of the songs before. The only time we’d heard modern music was in our parents’ cars when they decided to play AM radio. We were all about exploring the woods, fishing and letting our imaginations run wild, thankfully oblivious to the world changing around us.

We carefully looked through the records, occasionally putting one on Ron’s portable record player. We were intrigued by the colorful labels and the names of the songs.

A few summer days were spent listening to Mrs. Wright’s collection. Some records didn’t interest us, usually sappy ballads. These ended up in a huge field on Ron’s property. We would fling them to see how far they would fly, over and over until they cracked into pieces.

Three 45s captivated us more than the others — “Monster Mash” by Bobby (Boris) Picket, “Telstar” by The Tornadoes and, most of all, “This Magic Moment” by the Drifters. We sang it endlessly that summer whenever anything cool happened, which made us laugh until it hurt.

Looking back, Mrs. Wright must have been about 25 at the time. I could imagine her as a teenager taking that case of records to parties and spinning the latest tunes. Then one day she must have decided to give up the soundtrack of her childhood and move forward into adulthood.

• Nearly 45 years later, I inherited another record collection, this one more sizable and eclectic. A friend who knows of my vinyl obsession was helping clean out a house. He called and wondered if I’d be interested in some records he’d found. It was an all-or-nothing proposition, no cherry-picking the good stuff.

There were a huge number of records, but I was blinded by the incredibly diverse types of music — classical, religious, country, rock, folk, spoken and even a five-disc, red-vinyl set from Cornell University called “Songs of the Night.” It was a collection of frog calls from 1946. From Burl Ives to Led Zeppelin, this was going to be fun, I thought to myself.

All I knew about these records was that they had belonged to Sam, who had passed away.

I filled my entire truck bed with boxes, along with the crew cab, floor and front seat. Three boxes remained to pick up later.

Once home, I moved them all upstairs into my man cave. There was barely room to walk, and it was going to take a year to get the collection organized.

As I began to catalog the records, I discovered a wealth of beautiful music I had never heard before, just as I’d experienced with Mrs. Wright’s collection. There’s even a version of “This Magic Moment,” this one performed by Jay and The Americans.

Sam’s Frank Sinatra collection is deep — 78s, 45s and lots of LPs. One day, among the records I stumbled onto a sweet, handwritten note for Sam’s wife. It was tucked between the open shrink wrap of Sinatra’s “That’s Life” album: “These are little gifts for my sweetie, so that she’ll have something nice to want to come home for — Sam-xxxxx”

It was dated March 16, 1985.

• I treasure Sam’s collection and feel I know him through his records. We would have liked each other.

Some nights, while sitting alone upstairs by the soft glow of a Lava Lamp, I’ll gently place the needle on another one of his records and wonder what he was like. And also what Mrs. Wright must have felt when she was a teenager listening to “This Magic Moment.”

I guess I’ll never know. But I’ll always have their music to make me smile.