Who we are - Jukebox Junction, Inc.

Part of the story began on a Saturday afternoon in 1975. Antique restorer Ed Jones of Des Moines was rummaging through and old general store in Sharpsburg, in southwestern Iowa, looking for furniture when he spotted a dusty hulk partially hidden behind some tires. "It was a jukebox," he says. "I was intrigued so I persuaded the store owner to part with it for $200 although I had no idea of what I was buying. The exterior was in fine shape, but the mechanism wouldn't run."

"The more I looked, the more interested I became," he said. As Jones and a friend were carrying the machine out, they accidentally broke part of the plastic front. They took it home to Jone's basement garage in Des Moines. "I tinkered with it for a month and got everything working," he said. But it still needed a few small parts and the broken needed repair.

It wasn't long before Jones found himself consumed by his hobby, drawing up specifications for the remanufacturing of jukebox parts that had ceased to be produced years ago. "To make them reliable today,: Jones said, "you have to replace the worn parts. You can't just adjust around it after 50 years of wear. You have to replace them." By 1979, Jones was doing enough business that he figured he could quit his day job and devote all his time to his side business. A lot of friends advised him not to do it, but today he has no regrets.

Why should he? In 1983, he supplied the producers of the hit movie "The Big Chill" with a jukebox used to help promote the film and its rock 'n' roll sound track. The same year, he got a full-page plug in the Christmas issue of Playboy magazine and five years later he made it into Rolling Stone magazine. Not surprisingly, a lot of his clients are the entertainment industry.