STEUBENVILLE - Part of winding down one's lifetime of work is preparing for retirement.
George Creegan, master puppeteer, animation manufacturer and entrepreneur, had a different idea than just a 401(k). Through much of his life, he's been accumulating opera records, so many that his home is filled with them, in what was the recreation rooms in the basement, upstairs, off the den. There are pieces of opera history, books about operas, full cast listings for Broadway musicals from the early 20th century. There are endless photographs and showbills and posters and autographs including one of the great Enrico Caruso himself.
At the center of it all is Creegan, who is in the process of selling off the decades of work that was the Creegan Co., which at its height employed nearly 40 people manufacturing animated figures and store displays for shopping centers and stores across the nation and around the globe.
He's in the process of selling thousands of historic opera records, as well as other recordings, he's accumulated throughout his life. He said he always considered the collection as a kind of retirement plan, and the time has come to sell the records for retirement. He's cataloging them, and will be sending the catalog to known record collectors in the United States and Europe this week, the first of several catalogs he expects to send.
Creegan recalls when the massive collection started. He had heard Mario Lanza in "The Great Caruso," a movie about Caruso's life made in the early 1950s. Creegan said he figured he might want to hear the real Caruso.
"I was about 12 to 15 years old when I bought my first record," he said. He remembered stopping by what he thinks of as a junk store on a corner overlooking the Potomac River in his native Cumberland, Md. The lifelong love of opera was sparked. At one point, it even included a tryout for the Metropolitan Opera's southern company when he was in the Air Force.
He simply started accumulating records. There are albums. There are 78-rpm records. There are the 1/4-inch thick, single-sided Edison records with the label embossed on the record There are Pathe records that could only be played on a machine with a special needle that moved up and down (in what's called the "hill and dale" recording method) instead of the more conventional record players.
"I sold the machine I had that could play those," he said.
Creegan reached into a desk drawer in his den and produced a prized possession: an Edison cylinder recording of the great Caruso, still in its box, one of perhaps only three in existence now.
A trip to the basement finds more rarities, RCA Victor recordings and endlessly catalogued advertisements for records, shows, record-playing equipment. At the center of one room is a pair of reel-to-reel recording and playback machines, a cassette recorder, a turntable and a mixer where Creegan said he managed over the years to record many of these precious old records onto tape and later onto CDs.
The collection continued to build throughout his life, including his time in the Air Force in Germany in the mid-1950s. There, he met Danish tenor Helge Roswaenge, and formed a long friendship. There's an autographed picture of Roswaenge on the wall. Everywhere one looks, there's a picture of a famous opera star, an
artwork depicting a scene from a play or opera, or a showbill or a person from history of the opera or the development of recording systems and record playing.
"This room was the 'billiard room,' when the children were home. I had people from the company come and build these shelves in this room," he said, taking a visitor into a room filled floor to ceiling with shelving, library style, each shelf filled with records and books and historical documents relating to the opera.
Creegan still has records down at the Creegan Co. building at Fifth and Washington streets, too, as well as a popular music collection at the Treasure Island Marketplace.
Coming to Steubenville and settling down with family and his life's work at the Creegan Co. didn't stop the collecting. Creegan bought records wherever he could find them, and his work brought him across the country and around the world.
Collectors may also be interested in some of his original records from the Big Band era, including a collection of Bing Crosby's work before his name was even featured on records. Crosby, Creegan recounted, was part of a group called the The Rhythm Boys in the late 1920s, and they cut a recording as singers with the Paul Whiteman orchestra, but no individual credit for Crosby is given on the record label.
Creegan has been active in the Opera Guild and has written about opera, including many reviews and columns for the newspaper.
While the records at the marketplace and perhaps some of the collection at the old store will be sold to the public at large, Creegan is hoping to place the most valuable antique recordings in the hands of collectors who will treasure them as he has, cataloging them and preserving them.
Asked how many records he figures he has, Creegan laughs.
"I've never counted them. But I did listen to every one of them when they came in," he said.
(Giannamore's e-mail address is pgiannamore@heraldstaronline.com.)
