In The Hood: June
From June 2005
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A Home Business Finds a Groove
By David M. Drucker
About 50 years ago, Tom Hawthorn purchased his first antique phonograph, with a few accompanying records, for about a dollar. Last year, the mail-order and restoration business he and wife, Virginia, run out of their Roseville home grossed six figures.
Not bad for a hobby he used to enjoy for nothing, figures the former Sherman Clay piano and organ salesman.
“I consider myself to be extremely fortunate,” says Hawthorn, 58, who grew up in Capistrano Beach in Southern California’s Orange County and moved to Sacramento in 1987. “I was able to take a hobby doing something I love and would do anyway and turn it into a full-time business.”
Hawthorn’s Antique Audio specializes in refurbishing antique record players, starting with the first model for the home invented by Thomas Alva Edison in the late 1890s and ending in 1925 with the last of the purely acoustical top-of-the-line Victrolas.
Acoustics and Cosmetics
Continued...
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