My memory is that Ruth Hossack of Hossack's Jewelry and Records had turned me on to Jonathan and Darlene because I had bought every Anna Russell recording she had in stock - I'm still missing one and the CDs are incomplete - and I was raving about Mrs Miller to her.
I liked Ruth Hossack a lot, even though we were poles apart politically. She was crazy, a John Birch Society member, ultra-conservative, hater of anti-war protestors and blacks, yet we talked records, releases, and repertoire, and she clearly liked me because she was very generous in her discounts to meand even hired me the summer of 1970 to work the store. She had gotten so enormous that she spent her days in the apartment above the shop drinking gin and spending a lot of time in the tub because the water relieved the pressures her avoirdupois subjected her skeletal frame to. We had few customers during the day and an enormous stock that collectors from all over the country purchased, so she wopuld call me on the phone and tell me stories about record salesmen, artists she'd met, how she lost 100 lbs on a diet of shrimp and gin, and other matters.
Her husband was a wonderful jeweler and a very kind and patient man.
