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Virginia Hawthorne Roseville, CA |
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Virginia gradually adopted the sheet music section of their business as her own. She was a history teacher in her previous life, and found that both the illustrations and the song content provided an interesting view of American social history. She also found that a box of sheet music is much easier to carry than a box of records! Since 2002, Virginia has been presenting Microsoft PowerPoint programs, which feature her informative narration illustrated by examples from her sheet music collection and accompanied by selections from Tom's collection of early recordings. She has presented these lively and colorful historical programs to the Golden State Phonograph Society, Sierra Nevada Chapter of the Automatic Musical Instrument Collectors Association (AMICA), the Sacramento Art Deco Society, numerous historical societies, and has twice been on the program for the Association of Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC) annual international conference. Her program titles include: California Dreamin’ – Music from California’s "Booster" period following the demise of the Gold Rush; Art Deco Music – a historical perspective on the music of the 1930s; Ragtime San Francisco – music and sheet music dealers, composers, and recordings form the Bay Area Ragtime era; and California Ragtime – an expansion of Ragtime San Francisco, covering the whole state. |
For
the past 20 years, Tom and Virginia Hawthorn have been doing business in
Roseville, CA as Hawthorn's Antique Audio, specializing in recorded music, sheet
music and hand wound phonographs from the late 19th and early 20th
Centuries. In addition to their quarterly mail auctions, which feature 78
rpm records, cylinders, books, sheet music and musical ephemera, they maintain a sales
booth at the Antique Trove in Roseville, California. They also
periodically set up shop at a number of California's antique shows, and for the
past several years they have been the vintage sheet music vendors in
the Ragtime Store at the WCRS Festivals.